Application Performance Management (APM) with New Relic Training Course

Introduction to Application Performance Monitoring

• Comprehending Application Performance Management (APM) and its significance in modern operations
• The interplay between application performance, availability, reliability, and customer satisfaction
• Essential application performance indicators and service-level targets
• Recognizing common causes of application performance decline
• An overview of the monitoring lifecycle: observation, analysis, diagnosis, remediation, and optimization
• The role of New Relic in achieving full-stack observability

New Relic Capabilities and Architecture

• An overview of the New Relic platform and its primary features
• Understanding the New Relic architecture and data flow mechanisms
• New Relic agents, data collectors, and telemetry streams
• Overview of key data types: metrics, events, logs, traces, and errors
• Scope of APM, browser monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and database monitoring
• Understanding key entities including services, applications, and workloads
• Introduction to distributed tracing and service interdependencies
• Concepts related to data retention, querying, and visualization

Navigating the New Relic Interface

• Exploring the New Relic platform and its primary dashboards
• Managing applications, services, hosts, and entities
• Reviewing performance summaries and application health status
• Utilizing charts, tables, filters, and time range selection
• Searching and analyzing telemetry data effectively
• Tailoring dashboards and views to specific needs
• Constructing effective operational and performance dashboards
• Using New Relic to transition from high-level symptoms to detailed diagnostics

Installation and Configuration of New Relic Agents

• Understanding New Relic agent architecture and supported environments
• Deploying New Relic agents on application servers
• Configuring agents for specific application monitoring requirements
• Strategies for instrumentation: automatic vs. manual approaches
• Setting up browser and end-user monitoring capabilities
• Verifying agent installation and telemetry collection accuracy
• Managing configuration and environment-specific settings
• Troubleshooting issues related to agent installation and data collection
• Best practices for secure and maintainable agent deployment

Assessing Performance from the End-User View

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

Interpreting 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
• Tracking requests across application components using traces
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces for root-cause analysis
• Practical exercises in interpreting application telemetry

Measuring Application Resources and Infrastructure

• Monitoring resource utilization for applications and servers
• Understanding performance of CPU, memory, disk, and network resources
• Identifying resource saturation and capacity-related challenges
• Linking infrastructure metrics to application response times
• Monitoring application processes and active workloads
• Identifying transactions that are resource-intensive
• Investigating performance drops caused by infrastructure limitations
• Establishing performance baselines and detecting anomalous behavior

Alerting and Notification Strategies

• Understanding New Relic alerting frameworks
• Defining specific alert conditions and thresholds
• Creating alerts for application performance and availability
• Monitoring key indicators like error rates, response times, and throughput
• Designing actionable alert policies
• Configuring notification channels and incident management workflows
• Minimizing alert noise and preventing unnecessary notifications
• Understanding incident management and issue correlation
• Testing and validating alert configurations
• Best practices for proactive application monitoring

Database Operations Monitoring

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

Reporting and Visualizing Performance

• Creating meaningful performance reports
• Building dashboards tailored for development, operations, and management teams
• Selecting appropriate metrics for different stakeholders
• Visualizing application availability, response time, throughput, and errors
• 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

Performance Analysis and Optimization

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

Resolving 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 problems
• Analyzing failed API transactions
• Using traces to identify bottlenecks in distributed services
• Correlating API issues 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 service dependencies
• Introduction to distributed tracing concepts
• Following request paths across multiple application services
• Identifying latency introduced by individual services
• Analyzing communication 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 application performance
• Filtering and aggregating metrics and events
• Analyzing response times, errors, throughput, and transaction data
• Creating custom visualizations from query results
• Using queries to support troubleshooting and reporting efforts
• Building reusable queries and dashboards
• Practical NRQL exercises

Integrating New Relic with Third-Party Tools

• 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
• Leveraging integrations to support 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 errors
• Investigating infrastructure and database performance
• Tracing API and external service dependencies
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces
• Identifying the most likely root cause
• Developing and validating a remediation approach
• Configuring alerts to prevent recurrence
• Documenting findings and communicating business impact

Monitoring Best Practices and Operational Advice

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

Summary and Conclusion

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