Application Performance Management (APM) with New Relic Training Course

Introduction to Application Performance Monitoring

• Grasping Application Performance Management (APM) and its significance in modern application operations
• The interplay between application performance, availability, reliability, and customer experience
• Key performance indicators and service-level objectives for applications
• Recognizing common causes of application performance degradation
• Overview of the application monitoring lifecycle: observe, analyze, diagnose, remediate, and optimize
• Understanding New Relic’s role in achieving full-stack observability

New Relic Features and Architecture

• Overview of the New Relic platform and its fundamental capabilities
• Understanding the New Relic architecture and data flow mechanisms
• Details on New Relic agents, collectors, and telemetry data handling
• Overview of metrics, events, logs, traces, and error tracking
• Coverage of Application Performance Monitoring (APM), browser monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and database monitoring
• Understanding entities, services, applications, and workloads
• Introduction to distributed tracing and mapping service dependencies
• Concepts of data retention, querying, and visualization

Navigating the New Relic User Interface

• Navigating the New Relic platform and exploring primary dashboards
• Managing applications, services, hosts, and entities
• Exploring performance summaries and overall application health
• Utilizing charts, tables, filters, and time-range selectors
• Searching and analyzing telemetry data effectively
• Customizing dashboards and views to suit specific needs
• Creating operational and performance dashboards that deliver value
• Leveraging New Relic to transition from high-level symptoms to detailed diagnostics

Setting Up and Configuring New Relic Agents

• Understanding New Relic agent architecture and supported environments
• Installing New Relic agents on application servers
• Configuring agents for application-specific monitoring requirements
• Strategies for instrumentation: automatic versus manual approaches
• Configuring browser and end-user monitoring capabilities
• Validating agent installation and ensuring proper telemetry collection
• Managing configuration and environment-specific settings
• Troubleshooting common agent installation and data collection issues
• Best practices for secure and maintainable agent deployment

Measuring Application Performance from the End-User Perspective

• Understanding Real-User Monitoring (RUM) principles
• Measuring page-load times and application response speeds
• Monitoring browser performance and user interaction patterns
• Identifying slow pages, transactions, and user journeys
• Analyzing performance variations based on geography and device type
• Correlating end-user experience with backend application performance
• Identifying performance issues that directly impact customer satisfaction
• Using performance data to prioritize optimization efforts

Reading and Understanding Instrumentation Data

• Understanding transaction traces and application transaction flows
• Interpreting data on response time, throughput, and error rates
• Understanding transaction breakdowns and performance segments
• Analyzing interactions with external services and dependencies
• Examining application errors and associated error traces
• Identifying bottlenecks through instrumentation data analysis
• Using traces to track requests across various application components
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces for root-cause analysis
• Practical exercises in interpreting application telemetry data

Measuring Application Resources and Infrastructure

• Monitoring resource utilization across applications and servers
• Understanding CPU, memory, disk, and network performance metrics
• Identifying resource saturation and capacity-related challenges
• Correlating infrastructure metrics with application response times
• Monitoring application processes and workload distribution
• Identifying transactions that are resource-intensive
• Investigating performance degradation stemming from infrastructure constraints
• Establishing performance baselines and detecting abnormal behavior

Monitoring and Notifications

• Understanding New Relic alerting concepts and best practices
• Defining alert conditions and setting appropriate thresholds
• Creating alerts for application performance and availability issues
• Monitoring error rates, response times, throughput, and resource usage
• Designing alert policies that drive actionable responses
• Configuring notification channels and incident management workflows
• Reducing alert noise and preventing unnecessary notifications
• Understanding incident management and issue correlation
• Testing and validating alert configurations for accuracy
• Best practices for proactive application monitoring

Monitoring Database Operations

• Understanding the link between database performance and application performance
• Monitoring database calls and query activities
• Identifying slow database operations and processes
• Analyzing database response times for optimization
• Detecting inefficient or resource-heavy queries
• Correlating database operations with application transactions
• Investigating application bottlenecks related to database performance
• Using performance data to enhance query response times
• Practical exercises in diagnosing database performance issues

Reporting and Visualizing Application Performance

• Creating meaningful and impactful performance reports
• Building dashboards tailored for development, operations, and management teams
• Selecting appropriate metrics for different stakeholder audiences
• Visualizing application availability, response time, throughput, and error rates
• Tracking performance trends over extended periods
• Comparing application performance across different environments
• Presenting technical metrics as business-relevant insights
• Establishing baselines and reporting against defined objectives

Analyzing and Optimizing Application Performance

• Establishing a systematic approach to application performance analysis
• Identifying performance bottlenecks and anomalous behavior
• Analyzing transaction response times and throughput metrics
• Comparing current performance against historical baselines
• Correlating multiple telemetry sources during investigations
• Prioritizing performance issues based on user and business impact
• Identifying opportunities for application optimization
• Validating performance improvements using New Relic data
• Hands-on exercises in performance analysis

Troubleshooting API and Service Issues

• Monitoring APIs and external service dependencies
• Measuring API response time, throughput, and error rates
• Identifying slow or unreliable API endpoints
• Diagnosing timeout and connectivity-related issues
• Analyzing failed API transactions for insights
• Using traces to pinpoint bottlenecks across distributed services
• Correlating API problems with downstream dependencies
• Identifying the root cause of API performance degradation
• Developing and validating remediation strategies

Distributed Tracing and End-to-End Troubleshooting

• Understanding distributed applications and their service dependencies
• Introduction to core distributed tracing concepts
• Tracking requests across multiple application services
• Identifying latency introduced by individual services
• Analyzing communication patterns between services
• Detecting failures across distributed application components
• Correlating traces with logs, errors, and infrastructure metrics
• Performing comprehensive end-to-end root-cause analysis
• Practical troubleshooting scenarios in a live-lab environment

Querying and Analyzing New Relic Data

• Introduction to querying telemetry data within New Relic
• Understanding the New Relic Query Language (NRQL)
• Writing queries to investigate specific application performance issues
• Filtering and aggregating metrics and events for analysis
• Analyzing response times, errors, throughput, and transaction data
• Creating custom visualizations from query results
• Utilizing queries to support troubleshooting and reporting efforts
• Building reusable queries and dashboards for efficiency
• Practical NRQL exercises

Integrating New Relic with Third-Party Tools and Services

• Overview of available New Relic integrations
• Integrating New Relic with infrastructure and cloud platforms
• Connecting monitoring data with collaboration and incident-management tools
• Understanding integration workflows and data exchange mechanisms
• Configuring notifications and external service integrations
• Using integrations to enhance DevOps and incident-response processes
• Best practices for maintaining reliable monitoring integrations

Practical Troubleshooting Workshop

• Investigating a simulated application performance incident
• Identifying symptoms from end-user performance data
• Analyzing application transactions and error patterns
• Investigating infrastructure and database performance impacts
• Tracing API and external service dependencies
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces for a holistic view
• Identifying the most likely root cause of the issue
• Developing and validating a remediation approach
• Configuring alerts to prevent similar issues in the future
• Documenting findings and communicating business impact

Monitoring Best Practices and Operational Recommendations

• Designing an effective New Relic monitoring strategy
• Selecting meaningful performance and availability metrics
• Establishing baselines and defining service-level objectives
• Minimizing excessive monitoring noise
• Developing effective alerting and escalation practices
• Maintaining consistent monitoring across development, testing, and production environments
• Using observability data to drive continuous improvement
• Translating technical performance data into actionable business insights

Summary and Conclusion

• Review of New Relic architecture and core capabilities
• Recap of application, infrastructure, database, API, and end-user monitoring
• Review of troubleshooting and root-cause analysis techniques
• Review of alerting, dashboards, reporting, and integration features
• Final hands-on performance investigation exercise
• Discussion of real-world implementation scenarios
• Opportunity for questions and answers
• Recommended next steps for applying New Relic in production environments