¶ New Relic
¶ Dev Ops
¶ Introduction to New Relic: Seeing the Invisible in Modern DevOps
In the world of DevOps, where systems stretch across clusters, clouds, services, APIs, containers, queues, caches, and databases, one truth becomes clear very quickly: you can’t manage what you can’t see. Modern software doesn’t live in a single server anymore. It exists as a living ecosystem—dynamic, distributed, constantly evolving. That makes it both powerful and fragile. When something goes wrong, it’s rarely in the place you expect. A slowdown in one microservice ripples across others. A misconfigured dependency creates elusive latency spikes. A memory leak hides quietly until traffic surges. A sudden deployment introduces a regression no one notices until customers start complaining.
Amid this complexity, visibility is no longer optional. It is the lifeblood of stable, reliable, trustworthy systems. And this is exactly where New Relic steps in—not as a tool that simply collects metrics, but as a platform that helps you understand your system in a way that feels almost like turning on the lights in a dark room. Suddenly, the invisible becomes visible. The uncertain becomes interpretable. The overwhelming becomes navigable. New Relic is less about data and more about clarity.
This course, spanning one hundred articles, begins with a journey into New Relic because it embodies something central to DevOps: running fast without breaking things requires insight. True insight. Not guesswork, not assumptions, not reacting blindly to alerts. New Relic provides a way to observe systems holistically—applications, infrastructure, logs, traces, user behavior, error patterns, performance baselines, anomaly detection, service dependencies—all in one place. That single, unified lens transforms DevOps from a reactive practice into an informed one.
One of the first things you notice about New Relic is how effortlessly it blends into the flow of a modern stack. Whether your systems run on virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, cloud functions, or hybrid environments, New Relic meets you where you work. It doesn’t demand a rearchitecture or force you to rebuild your monitoring pipelines. Instead, it listens. It instruments. It observes. And in doing so, it builds a portrait of your systems that feels alive—always updating, always contextualizing, always revealing how each piece interacts with the others.
To understand why New Relic matters so much to DevOps, it helps to look at how software has changed. Years ago, most applications lived inside a single monolith. Monitoring was simple: check CPU, memory, logs, and maybe a few endpoints. If the server stayed healthy, the application usually did too. But the moment the industry shifted to microservices, distributed systems, and cloud-native architectures, everything changed. Suddenly, no single server told the whole story. Performance problems became distributed puzzles. Failures turned into chain reactions. And monitoring became a discipline rather than an afterthought.
New Relic was one of the pioneers that recognized this shift early. It understood that teams needed more than charts—they needed observability. Observability is not just about tracking resource usage; it’s about making sense of how internal states influence external behavior. It’s about answering complex questions quickly:
- Why did latency spike after the last deployment?
- Which service is the bottleneck in this request path?
- Why did error rates rise only for users in a particular region?
- Is the slowdown caused by the application, the database, the network, or the infrastructure?
- How do all these services relate to each other?
New Relic’s ability to answer such questions—often within seconds—is what makes it a DevOps essential.
One of the things that sets New Relic apart is the way it treats data as part of a larger narrative. Metrics, logs, and traces aren’t isolated components. They are chapters from the same story. When you combine them, patterns emerge. You begin to see how a CPU spike in one container correlates with increased error rates in another. You understand how a new code release affects downstream services. You notice how user experience shifts when backend performance fluctuates. The ability to stitch these signals together is the essence of observability, and New Relic excels at this weaving.
Developers appreciate New Relic because it gives them deep application insight without friction. With instrumentation built into the language agents, performance data flows naturally. You can see slow database queries, problematic transactions, memory usage trends, garbage collection behavior, thread bottlenecks, and more—all without hunting through logs. Instead of guessing why an endpoint runs slowly, developers can trace it through the entire stack and identify the root cause. This saves time, reduces frustration, and helps teams build better applications.
Operations teams rely on New Relic because it provides high-level visibility into infrastructure. Whether a system spans hundreds of containers or dozens of servers, New Relic highlights where the stress is building. It shows which components are nearing resource limits, which services degrade during peak traffic, and which nodes behave differently from the norm. This empowers ops teams to anticipate problems before they escalate, improving reliability and reducing fire drills.
Product teams benefit from New Relic too, because it reveals something often overlooked—how real users experience the application. User-centric metrics like latency distribution, error rates, page load times, and session patterns provide a clear picture of the customer journey. In an age where user experience determines competitiveness, this kind of insight is invaluable. Instead of relying on opinions, teams can use data to shape decisions.
And then there’s the reliability engineering side of DevOps, where New Relic becomes a partner in resilience. Understanding error budgets, SLOs, and SLIs requires precise, trustworthy data. New Relic collects, aggregates, and visualizes that data in ways that help teams maintain reliability targets without suffocating innovation. It supports the delicate balance between moving fast and maintaining stability—one of DevOps’ core challenges.
What makes New Relic particularly compelling is how it adapts to organizations as they grow. A small team deploying a single service can use it to get clarity and confidence. A large enterprise running thousands of services across multiple clouds can use the same platform with expanded depth, custom dashboards, synthetic monitoring, distributed tracing, governance controls, and anomaly detection powered by machine learning. New Relic doesn’t impose scale; it accommodates it.
Another essential aspect of New Relic is its emphasis on storytelling through data. Dashboards aren’t just charts—they are narratives crafted for teams to understand systems at a glance. Alerts aren’t just warnings—they’re signals that help teams recognize the difference between random fluctuations and genuine problems. Distributed tracing isn’t just a graph—it’s a map of your system’s nervous system.
This narrative quality is what makes New Relic feel so intuitive. It invites exploration. You click through traces. You discover dependencies. You uncover hidden inefficiencies. You follow chains of events like a detective unraveling a mystery. And as you move through this work, you build intuition—a deeper understanding of your system’s personality. Over time, you start recognizing patterns, predicting behavior, and anticipating issues before they spiral. That kind of intuition is one of the strongest assets a DevOps team can have.
As you progress through this course, you’ll explore the many dimensions of New Relic. You’ll understand how instrumentation works behind the scenes, how distributed tracing stitches together disparate elements of your architecture, how logs enrich context, how dashboards bring meaning to complex data, and how alerting strategies shape the way teams respond to incidents. You’ll see how New Relic integrates with CI/CD pipelines, how it supports canary deployments, how it reveals performance regressions, and how it gives teams confidence during fast-paced release cycles.
You’ll also dive into how New Relic aligns with DevOps principles more broadly:
- Automation through alert pipelines, anomaly detection, and data ingestion.
- Collaboration through shared dashboards, integrated workflows, and cross-team visibility.
- Continuous improvement through performance baselines and trend analysis.
- Feedback loops that accelerate development and improve user experience.
- Resilience engineering through SLO tracking and error budget management.
By the end of this journey, New Relic won’t feel like an external tool—it will feel like an extension of your system, a lens through which complexity becomes understandable.
But before diving into those details, it’s important to acknowledge the deeper reason why New Relic matters in the first place.
Modern systems are complex because users expect more—faster services, smoother experiences, richer features, and uninterrupted availability. But complexity, when left unseen, becomes fragility. And fragility is the enemy of DevOps. New Relic allows teams to confront complexity with clarity. It offers a foundation of truth in environments where assumptions can be dangerous. It provides the visibility that makes speed safe.
In this sense, New Relic isn’t just an observability platform—it's a guide. It shows you how your system breathes, where it struggles, where it excels, and how it evolves with each change. It reminds you that good engineering isn’t just about writing code, but about understanding the full lifecycle of that code in production. And it reinforces one of the most important lessons of DevOps: stability is not achieved through caution—it’s achieved through insight.
As you embark on this course and gradually deepen your knowledge, keep this idea with you: observability isn’t about collecting data. It’s about revealing truth. And New Relic is one of the most effective tools ever created for bringing that truth into focus.
Welcome to the world of New Relic—where systems speak, and for the first time, you can truly listen.
¶ New Relic
¶ Beginner Level
1. Introduction to DevOps and Monitoring
2. What is New Relic? Overview and Core Features
3. Setting Up Your New Relic Account
4. Navigating the New Relic Dashboard
5. Installing the New Relic Agent on Your Infrastructure
6. Understanding New Relic APM (Application Performance Monitoring)
7. Creating Your First New Relic Application Monitoring Setup
8. Configuring New Relic to Monitor Web Applications
9. How New Relic Tracks and Measures Application Performance
10. Understanding New Relic's Key Metrics: Response Time, Throughput, Error Rate
11. Setting Up and Configuring New Relic for Web Services
12. Installing and Configuring New Relic for Databases
13. Exploring the New Relic UI: Navigating Through APM, Infrastructure, and Alerts
14. Understanding New Relic's Distributed Tracing Capabilities
15. Introduction to Custom Metrics and Custom Events in New Relic
16. Setting Up Basic Alerts and Notifications in New Relic
17. Configuring Application Monitoring with New Relic for Mobile Apps
18. Monitoring Infrastructure with New Relic Infrastructure
19. Visualizing Application Performance Data Using New Relic Dashboards
20. Monitoring Cloud Infrastructure with New Relic (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
21. Integrating New Relic with Your Version Control Systems
22. Best Practices for Using New Relic for DevOps Monitoring
23. Configuring New Relic for Microservices Architecture
24. Exploring New Relic Logs: Viewing Logs and Setting Up Log Alerts
25. Understanding New Relic's Synthetic Monitoring for Uptime Checks
26. Setting Up Basic Synthetic Monitoring in New Relic
27. Adding More Application Hosts for Monitoring in New Relic
28. Using New Relic for Basic Server Monitoring
29. Setting Up Basic Mobile App Monitoring with New Relic
30. Understanding New Relic's Error Analytics and Troubleshooting Tools
¶ Intermediate Level
31. Advanced New Relic Configuration: Tuning Your Application Monitoring
32. Using New Relic’s Distributed Tracing to Debug Latency Issues
33. Advanced Alerting Techniques: Escalation Policies and Alerts on Errors
34. Using New Relic's Infrastructure Monitoring for Containers and Virtualization
35. Integrating New Relic with CI/CD Pipelines for Continuous Monitoring
36. Understanding New Relic's Browser Monitoring for Frontend Performance
37. Setting Up and Monitoring APIs with New Relic
38. Optimizing Performance with New Relic Insights
39. Configuring New Relic to Monitor Custom Applications and Services
40. Using New Relic for Network Performance Monitoring
41. Setting Up New Relic for Real-Time Application Performance Insights
42. Advanced Use of New Relic Dashboards for Custom Monitoring Views
43. Leveraging New Relic’s Alerts and Insights for Proactive Issue Resolution
44. Setting Up Alerts for Scaling Events Using New Relic
45. Integrating New Relic with Slack for Real-Time Notifications
46. Using New Relic for Monitoring Kubernetes Clusters and Containers
47. Customizing New Relic Dashboards for Multi-Team Monitoring
48. Using New Relic for Serverless Application Monitoring (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions)
49. Setting Up and Managing New Relic for Hybrid Cloud Environments
50. Implementing Load Testing with New Relic’s Synthetic Monitoring
51. Integrating New Relic with Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
52. Scaling Infrastructure Monitoring with New Relic for Large Environments
53. Using New Relic Insights for Advanced Analytics
54. Monitoring Dependencies and Third-Party Services with New Relic
55. Integrating New Relic with GitOps for Continuous Observability
56. Setting Up New Relic for Real-Time Logging in Production Environments
57. Using New Relic for Application Dependency Mapping
58. Integrating New Relic with Jira for Incident Management
59. Monitoring Cloud-Native Applications with New Relic on Kubernetes
60. Using New Relic to Monitor Your Continuous Deployment Pipeline
61. Advanced Logging and Event Tracking in New Relic
62. Using New Relic’s Real-Time Analytics to Track Performance Trends
63. Understanding and Managing New Relic Licenses and Pricing
64. Setting Up New Relic to Monitor Web Services (REST, SOAP, GraphQL)
65. Using New Relic for Monitoring and Managing Cloud Databases (RDS, BigQuery)
66. Creating Custom Instrumentation in New Relic to Monitor Specific Services
67. Setting Up New Relic for Monitoring Serverless APIs (API Gateway)
68. Using New Relic to Monitor User Interactions on Websites and Applications
69. Setting Up New Relic to Monitor Security and Compliance Metrics
70. Optimizing and Tuning New Relic for High-Volume Applications
¶ Advanced Level
71. Designing a Global Monitoring Strategy with New Relic for Distributed Teams
72. Scaling New Relic for Enterprise-Level Infrastructure Monitoring
73. Advanced Configuration of New Relic Infrastructure for High Availability
74. Using New Relic to Monitor Microservices in Multi-Cloud Environments
75. Creating Automated Remediation Workflows with New Relic and Webhooks
76. Integrating New Relic with Terraform for Infrastructure as Code
77. Building Custom Alerts and Automated Incident Response in New Relic
78. Monitoring Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments with New Relic
79. Optimizing Real-Time Dashboards for Large Teams with New Relic
80. Analyzing Performance Bottlenecks with New Relic Distributed Tracing
81. Integrating New Relic with AWS CloudWatch for Extended Monitoring
82. Using New Relic for High-Resolution Infrastructure Monitoring
83. Advanced Performance Analysis with New Relic’s Custom Metrics and Events
84. Setting Up New Relic for Multi-Region, Multi-Tenant Cloud Applications
85. Creating Advanced Dashboards and Alerts for Database Monitoring in New Relic
86. Using New Relic to Monitor Service-Level Agreements (SLAs)
87. Proactive Resource Scaling with New Relic’s Autoscaling Features
88. Advanced Troubleshooting with New Relic Logs and Traces
89. Monitoring and Managing Security Events with New Relic
90. Integrating New Relic with Prometheus and Grafana for Hybrid Monitoring
91. Using New Relic for Continuous Compliance Monitoring in DevOps
92. Advanced Custom Instrumentation in New Relic: Deep Integration
93. Using New Relic to Analyze and Improve Application Scalability
94. Managing Real-Time and Historical Performance Data with New Relic Insights
95. Extending New Relic with Custom Plugins and Integrations
96. Implementing Predictive Analytics with New Relic AI and Machine Learning
97. Advanced Synthetic Monitoring with New Relic for Load and Stress Testing
98. Managing New Relic Across Multiple Teams and Business Units
99. Implementing Zero-Downtime Deployments with New Relic Monitoring
100. Future of DevOps Observability: Leveraging New Relic for the Next Generation of Monitoring