Application Performance Management (APM) with New Relic Training Course

Introduction to Application Performance Monitoring

• Explaining the role of Application Performance Management (APM) in modern application operations
• The connection between application performance, availability, reliability, and user experience
• Essential application performance indicators and service-level objectives
• Recognizing typical causes of performance degradation
• The application monitoring lifecycle: observation, analysis, diagnosis, remediation, and optimization
• The position of New Relic in full-stack observability

New Relic Capabilities and Architecture

• An overview of the New Relic platform and its primary features
• How New Relic’s architecture and data flow operate
• New Relic agents, collectors, and telemetry data handling
• An introduction to metrics, events, logs, traces, and errors
• Coverage of Application Performance Monitoring (APM), browser monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and database monitoring
• The concepts of entities, services, applications, and workloads
• Basics of distributed tracing and service dependencies
• Concepts surrounding data retention, querying, and visualization

Navigating the New Relic Interface

• Moving through the New Relic platform and key dashboards
• Managing applications, services, hosts, and entities
• Reviewing performance summaries and application health indicators
• Utilizing charts, tables, filters, and time range selectors
• Searching for and analyzing telemetry data
• Tailoring dashboards and views to specific needs
• Constructing effective operational and performance dashboards
• Using New Relic to move from high-level symptoms to detailed diagnostics

Installing and Configuring New Relic Agents

• The New Relic agent architecture and compatible environments
• Deploying New Relic agents on application servers
• Tuning agents for application-specific monitoring needs
• Strategies for instrumentation: automatic versus manual
• Configuring browser and end-user monitoring
• Verifying agent installation and data collection efficacy
• Handling configuration and environment-specific settings
• Resolving agent installation and data collection challenges
• Best practices for secure and sustainable agent deployment

Assessing Application Performance from the End-User View

• Real-user monitoring (RUM) concepts
• Measuring page-load and application response times
• Monitoring browser performance and user interactions
• Spotting slow pages, transactions, and user journeys
• Analyzing performance variations by geography and device
• Linking end-user experience with backend application performance
• Recognizing performance issues that directly impact customer experience
• Using performance data to prioritize optimization efforts

Interpreting Instrumentation Data

• Understanding transaction traces and application transactions
• Reading response time, throughput, and error-rate data
• Breaking down transactions and analyzing performance segments
• Evaluating external services and dependencies
• Reviewing application errors and error traces
• Spotting bottlenecks through instrumentation data
• Using traces to follow requests across application components
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces for root-cause analysis
• Practical exercises in interpreting application telemetry

Monitoring Application Resources and Infrastructure

• Tracking application and server resource usage
• Understanding CPU, memory, disk, and network performance
• Recognizing resource saturation and capacity-related issues
• Correlating infrastructure metrics with application response times
• Monitoring application processes and workloads
• Identifying resource-intensive transactions
• Investigating performance degradation caused by infrastructure constraints
• Setting performance baselines and spotting abnormal behavior

Monitoring and Alerting

• Core concepts of New Relic alerting
• Defining alert conditions and thresholds
• Setting up alerts for application performance and availability
• Monitoring error rates, response times, throughput, and resource utilization
• Designing actionable alert policies
• Configuring notification channels and incident workflows
• Minimizing alert noise and preventing unnecessary notifications
• Understanding incidents and issue correlation
• Testing and validating alert configurations
• Best practices for proactive application monitoring

Monitoring Database Operations

• The relationship between database and application performance
• Monitoring database calls and query activity
• Identifying slow database operations
• Analyzing database response times
• Detecting inefficient or resource-heavy queries
• Correlating database operations with application transactions
• Investigating database-related application bottlenecks
• Using performance data to enhance query response times
• Practical exercises for diagnosing database performance issues

Reporting and Visualizing Application Performance

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

Analyzing and Optimizing Application Performance

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

Troubleshooting API and Service Issues

• Monitoring APIs and external service dependencies
• Measuring API response time, throughput, and error rates
• Identifying slow and unreliable API endpoints
• Diagnosing timeout and connectivity issues
• Analyzing failed API transactions
• Using traces to identify 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 service dependencies
• Introduction to distributed tracing concepts
• Following requests across multiple application services
• Identifying latency introduced by individual services
• Analyzing service-to-service communication
• Detecting failures across distributed application components
• Correlating traces with logs, errors, and infrastructure metrics
• Performing end-to-end root-cause analysis
• Practical troubleshooting scenarios using a live-lab environment

Querying and Analyzing New Relic Data

• Introduction to querying telemetry data in 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
• Building reusable queries and dashboards
• Practical NRQL exercises

Integrating New Relic with Third-Party Tools and Services

• Overview of 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
• Configuring notifications and external service integrations
• Using 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 Recommendations

• 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