Performance Auditing with New Relic

Owned by Cole Geerts (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 07, 2022
3 min read

New Relic is a monitoring service that allows us to keep a close eye on all of our instances.

Enabling New Relic for a Client

Requires SSH access to the instance or server in question as well as access to the sysadmin@kalamuna.com New Relic account.

  1. Sign in at https://login.newrelic.com/login

  2. Select "Add more data" in the top right hand corner

  3. Select the type of monitoring we'd like to collect (typically PHP, Browser Metrics, or NodeJS)

  4. Select the account you'd like to bill the service to (If there is no account created for the client, New Relic support must be contacted via a support ticket to add a new option)

  5. Click "Begin Installation"

  6. SSH into the remote service you'd like to monitor

  7. Copy + Paste the curl command to the remote service and run it

  8. Follow the installation steps in the terminal

  9. Now your entity should be available via New Relic

What to Look Out For

Keep an eye out for particularly slow routes. New Relic will provide a breakdown of Drupal Views in the monitor.

In most cases, the most important metric is total web transaction time, since we want our frontend to be ideally quick to respond.

New Relic also provides a breakdown of errors and violations, leverage this to get a better view of things that simply don't work instead of just being slow.

New Relic will generate an "Apdex score" which is a usability score of the application over time. You can configure notification for periods of poor performance.

Creating a report in New Relic

New Relic Provides a few ways to give clients a glance at server performance.

  1. Click "Query your data" along the top of the app

  2. Ensure “Data Explorer“ is selected along the top

  3. Select the appropriate account from the dropdown in the top bar

  4. Select the event type you'd like to graph

  5. Organize the data as appropriate for the performance audit. For more granularity, custom queries can be made in the Query Builder (selectable along the top)

  6. Once the chart is appropriate, click the ellipses in the top right hand corner of the graph and download the chart

Image shows total transactions for the application over time

More info on NRQL (New Relic's Query Language): https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/query-your-data/nrql-new-relic-query-language/get-started/introduction-nrql-new-relics-query-language/