New Relic is a leading cloud based observability platform, designed to help its customers optimize their software. New Relic works as a SAAS(Software as a service) tool, monitoring everything from your databases to servers to user behaviour. After this course you will find New Relic to be intuitive and easy to use. New Relic gives you detailed stack traces of each error and even provides an overview of the experience your customers have while visiting your website.

You will create a New Relic account as well as install an agent in your application. The agent is a lightweight bit of code that gives detailed and segmented information about how long it takes for your servers to respond. The data the agent reports will be used to calculate metrics like Apdex Scores, SLO's, SLI's and SLA's. We will make use of the automated baselining feature as well.

Everything is well documented and separated, so you can find what you need. Assignments and Quizzes will make sure you stay on track and test your knowledge. The course will have a combination of theory and practical examples.

The Introduction

Understand why we should use New Relic and what having an APM tool really enables us to achieve. Everything in this course will be straight from the free trial version, so you you don't need to buy anything. What does the New Relic architecture look like? Familiarize yourself with the mechanics of the course.

The Application Setup

Start of by signing up for New Relic. Learn how to integrate the New Relic agents in your applications. For an example we will be using a NodeJS application. We also demonstrate how to do this with a heavier Java application making use of TomCat.

New Relic APM

New Relic APM is the flagship product of New Relic One. We will spend some time learning how to navigate the UI, from the application overview dashboard to service maps, get detailed insights into your application's performance. Debug errors using the error analytics dashboard. We will touch upon the legacy errors page as well. Understand how Apdex score is calculated and how to set your thresholds in New Relic.

Infrastructure and Kubernetes Monitoring

We need Kubernetes to orchestrate our containers but who will monitor Kubernetes? New Relic comes to our rescue. Kubernetes creates a layer of abstraction which we wish to monitor. First setup a simple MiniKube cluster incase you do not already have one. We shall aim to obtain metrics from nodes, pods and all our deployments.

Alerting

You are rushing to debug a major production issue. The last thing you want is a lot of spam alerting disturbing you. Whether you use Slack or HipChat you want to be notified quickly on whichever platform your team is comfortable with. To achieve this goals we understand how New Relic Alerting works and setup a sample Integration with Slack. We learn how to take advantage of all the features available in the UI.

User Monitoring

A single malfunctioning checkout button of an e-commerce website can cost you millions of dollars. Client side monitoring is fundamentally different from monitoring software or infrastructure. The focus is on what happens after once the server has sent a response. The primary goal is to understand what the user is going through. Real user monitoring means monitoring real users once the application is live. We achieve this by a simple snippet we put into our code. But this reports issues after the customer has seen them. Which means we rely on synthetic testing to prepare the website before customers actually come.