What is New Relic?

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Imagine you have to build a web app which could be a social media website, an e-commerce site or an online game, etc. Normally you host it in the cloud or in your own data center. In the beginning, you see that it is working perfect, usually due to the low traffic. As time passes, the number of people visiting the web page increases. If this increases drastically, you will notice that your pages have slowed down and the customers are unhappy with your service which results in your sales going down. Here you wouldn’t know where to begin or how to fix it. This is where New Relic comes to your aid.

New Relic is a web application performance service designed to work in real-time with your live web app. New Relic Infrastructure provides flexible, dynamic server monitoring. Infrastructure empowers modern operation teams to make intelligent decisions about complex systems, from a physical datacenter to thousands of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Microsoft Azure instances. Think of it as a performance dashboard with X-ray vision. It lets you see deep inside your web application with respect to the end user’s experience within the app itself, down to the line of code. New Relic takes the pain of monitoring, troubleshooting and scaling the web app, away from your hands and makes it easy to you. You can see the important performance data of your app in New Relic, like browser response time by geography and browser type, web transactions in real-time, etc. New Relic works with all the different web development languages and so compatibility is not an issue. New Relic works as a service so that you can access it from anywhere and anytime. It can be considered as the plumbing that makes web apps run faster.

New Relic Insights uses data from New Relic’s other products and uses it to analyze user behavior, business transactions, customer insights, and more. Insights help people to visualize trends, create real-time dashboards and customizable charts for your metrics. It aids the users by helping them build better apps and make better decisions. Using the Insights interface, you can quickly and easily build dashboards to identify problems with your apps and hosts in real-time or to track ongoing data trends.

New Relic has an agent, which is a small piece of code that sits inside the web application and watches what the web page code is building while it’s building web pages. The agent measures how long the code takes to build the web page and reports it back to the user. It informs the user of the time taken for a page to load and specifies if any factors are delaying the process. It displays the load time for users all across the globe accessing the web application and it follows it all the way down, right to the code. So the user will be able to determine if the longer load time is caused by something in your server, code, network, or in the browser, etc.

All the performance metrics on the dashboard are presented by New Relic. You don’t have to customise any of it. You can drill down on the “browser page load time” to the amount of time the web application, network, DOM processing, page rendering etc take at various instance of time. You can optimise your code and then take a relook at how it’s performing now by comparing it with the historical data in New Relic. You can also see if somebody has deployed a new code along with the browser page load time and check if it affected the load time.

AWS integrations

New Relic’s Amazon integrations helps you monitor AWS data in several New Relic products. The various integrations include AWS API Gateway monitoring integration, AWS DynamoDB monitoring integration, AWS VPC monitoring integration, AWS EC2 monitoring integration. To see the whole list of integrations available for AWS, click here. Anyone can view and explore the AWS data reporting to your New Relic Infrastructure account. Only the Owners, Admins or Infrastructure add-on managers can add AWS integrations. In order to obtain AWS data to your New Relic Infrastructure account you have to follow a procedure which will be discussed shortly. Once the configuration process is complete, the AWS data will report directly to New Relic Insights.

To connect your AWS account to the New Relic Infrastructure account, you must first install the infrastructure agent. To connect your AWS account to New Relic Infrastructure(as per New Relic’s document):

1. Go to infrastructure.newrelic.com. Select Amazon Web Services from Integrations, and then select Add an AWS account. Follow the instructions to create a new role in AWS.
2. From the IAM option in your AWS console, select Create role and then choose Another AWS account.

• For Account ID, use 754728514883.
• Check the Require external ID box.
• For External ID, enter your New Relic account ID.
• Do not enable the setting to Require MFA (multi-factor authentication).

3. Attach the Policy: Search for ReadOnlyAccess, select the checkbox for the policy named ReadOnlyAccess, then click Next: Review.

4. For the Role name, enter NewRelicInfrastructure-Integrations, then click Create role.

5. Select the newly created role from the listed roles. On the Role summary page, select and copy the entire Role ARN (required later in this procedure).

6. Configure a Budgets policy: While viewing the Role summary for your new role, select Add inline policy.

7. Create a Custom policy: Enter a policy name (for example, NewRelicBudget), add the following permission statement, and then select Apply policy.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "budgets:ViewBudget"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

8. Return to the New Relic UI to enter your AWS account name and the ARN for the new role.

9. Select the Amazon Web Services to be monitored with New Relic Infrastructure integrations, then Save.

If you want to connect multiple AWS accounts with New Relic, follow the above steps for each account.

You can connect multiple AWS integrations with your New Relic Infrastructure account. Choose Amazon Web Services from Integrations in infrastructure.newrelic.com. Select the edit icon and then select the integrations you want to monitor. If you have previously set up an ARN with the more restrictive AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess policy, first unlink your existing integration, then create a new one with a broader policy.

To uninstall your services completely from New Relic Infrastructure Integrations, unlink your AWS account from the edit option( Amazon Web Services from Integrations in infrastructure.newrelic.com ). Then delete the role you have made in your AWS console from IAM.

Benefits of New Relic

1. Software as a service (SaaS)— There is no installation required for New Relic. It can be accessed from anywhere and at any time.
2. Simpler and easy to use.
3. Availability monitoring — you will have access to a nice report which will visually show you when any downtime has occurred.
4. Customer Error Recording — New Relic will record customer errors for you and gives you a nice graph. You can also see the stack trace for each error.
5. Transaction tracking — you will be able to see where your application is spending most of its time.
6. External Service Call recording — whenever you make calls to other services from within you app (e.g. an HTTP request to an API like Twitter), New Relic will monitor these as external calls. Often these external services can significantly degrade the performance of your app, especially if you make these calls in-process. New Relic can show which of your external calls are slowest, which ones you call the most and which respond the slowest on average.
7. Scalability and Capacity analysis — you can tell straight away how well your app is scaling, you can do load tests and instantly see if you application can handle the load. You can observe your application response time trends as your user base grows and predict when you’ll need to add capacity.