New Relic

Full-stack observability from one platform. New Relic's unified NRDB stores all your telemetry — APM traces, infrastructure metrics, browser RUM, logs, and synthetic results — and lets you query and correlate everything with NRQL, a powerful SQL-like query language.

What is New Relic?

New Relic is a cloud observability platform that ingests all telemetry types — metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) — into a single database called NRDB. Unlike traditional monitoring tools that store each signal type separately, NRDB enables cross-signal correlation: jump from an error event to the distributed trace to the infrastructure metrics to the log line, all within a single query or UI flow.

New Relic's APM agents automatically instrument your application code with zero configuration changes. The agent patches your HTTP framework, database drivers, and cache clients at startup, injecting tracing headers and recording timing data without requiring manual span creation.

Platform Capabilities

• APM — automatic instrumentation for transactions, database queries, external calls; Apdex scoring
• Distributed Tracing — end-to-end traces across services with W3C Trace Context support
• Infrastructure Monitoring — host metrics, container metrics, Kubernetes cluster monitoring
• Log Management — ingest, search, and correlate logs with traces and errors
• Browser Monitoring (RUM) — real user page load times, Core Web Vitals, JS error tracking
• Synthetic Monitoring — scripted browser and API tests from global locations
• Mobile Monitoring — crash reporting and performance for iOS and Android
• Alerts — NRQL-based alert conditions, anomaly detection, notification routing

APM Agent Setup (Node.js)

// New Relic APM — Node.js auto-instrumentation
// 1. Install the agent
// npm install newrelic

// 2. newrelic.js (project root — loaded before everything else)
'use strict';
exports.config = {
  app_name: ['My Application'],
  license_key: process.env.NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY,
  logging: { level: 'info' },
  allow_all_headers: true,
  distributed_tracing: { enabled: true },
  application_logging: {
    forwarding: { enabled: true },
    local_decorating: { enabled: true },
  },
  transaction_tracer: {
    enabled: true,
    transaction_threshold: 'apdex_f', // trace transactions slower than Apdex threshold
    record_sql: 'obfuscated',
    explain_threshold: 500, // ms — log slow query explain plans
  },
};

// 3. Require newrelic as FIRST LINE of your entry point
require('newrelic');
const express = require('express');

NRQL Query Examples

-- NRQL (New Relic Query Language) Examples

-- Error rate over the last hour
SELECT percentage(count(*), WHERE error IS TRUE)
FROM Transaction
WHERE appName = 'my-app'
SINCE 1 hour ago

-- P95 response time by endpoint
SELECT percentile(duration, 95)
FROM Transaction
WHERE appName = 'my-app'
FACET request.uri
SINCE 30 minutes ago

-- Throughput (requests per minute)
SELECT rate(count(*), 1 minute)
FROM Transaction
WHERE appName = 'my-app'
TIMESERIES 1 minute
SINCE 1 hour ago

-- Database slow queries
SELECT average(databaseDuration), count(*)
FROM Transaction
WHERE databaseDuration > 0.1
FACET databaseType
SINCE 1 day ago

Agent Installation (Other Languages)

# Python
pip install newrelic
newrelic-admin generate-config $NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY newrelic.ini
NEW_RELIC_CONFIG_FILE=newrelic.ini newrelic-admin run-program gunicorn app:application

# Java (via -javaagent JVM flag)
wget https://download.newrelic.com/newrelic/java-agent/newrelic-agent/current/newrelic.jar
java -javaagent:newrelic.jar -jar your-app.jar

# Go
go get github.com/newrelic/go-agent/v3/newrelic

# Infrastructure Agent (Linux)
curl -Ls https://download.newrelic.com/install/newrelic-cli/scripts/install.sh | bash
newrelic install

New Relic vs Datadog