APM (host-based) subscription usage

For accounts on our original pricing plan, this doc explains how New Relic calculates billable usage for APM accounts that have host-based pricing (not CU-based pricing). This document also provides available subscription usage attributes and example NRQL queries to use in the New Relic UI or with API calls.

Data generation

Once per day, an APM account will generate an NrDailyUsage event for:

• Every application instance that existed during the last 24 hours
• Every unique host on which an application instance ran during the last 24 hours

These two types of events allow your usage data to be queried and analyzed in many different ways. To query the application events, use a usageType attribute value of Application. To query the host events, use a usageType attribute value of Host.

All APM events use a productLine attribute value of APM. For more information, see APM query examples.

Usage calculations

For host-based APM pricing, monthly billable usage is determined by the number of equivalent hosts used during that month. An equivalent host is defined as: 750 hours (standardized number of monthly hours) of connection to New Relic by a host or multiple hosts. For more on this calculation, see host-based pricing.

To get an estimate of the current month's billable usage:

1. Go to: account dropdown > Account settings > Usage.
2. On the APM usage page, set the time picker to Current month.
3. See the Avg daily equivalent hosts for an account or grouping of accounts.

The UI is meant to estimate your host usage but, especially for cloud environments, your usage may go up or down over time. For more information about the usage UI, see Introduction to New Relic subscription usage data.

Table definitions

Here are definitions of the column headers in the UI table and CSV files. The columns you see depend on the Group by option selected at the top of the page.

General attributes

The following are general (not APM-specific) account-related attributes. These attributes can help you understand how your accounts and sub-accounts are using New Relic products.

APM attributes (host-based)

The following are usage-related attributes generated by host-based APM accounts (not CU-based APM). To query APM-specific data, use a productLine attribute value of APM.

Query examples

Here are some examples of NRQL queries you can use with your account usage data. You can run NRQL queries and use the resulting charts in dashboards.

Usage for last month

This query uses New Relic’s standard number of hours per month (750) for the purpose of calculating APM equivalent hosts over the last month.

SELECT sum(apmHoursUsed)/750 
AS 'Equivalent hosts' 
FROM NrDailyUsage 
WHERE usageType='Host' 
AND productLine='APM' 
SINCE last month 
UNTIL this month

Usage per host per application

New Relic records usage per application instance, not strictly per application. This query gives an approximation of the usage for a given application on a given host. If unique application instances run sequentially on a host within a given day, this query could return an underestimate (this would be likely, for example, in a container environment).

SELECT max(apmHoursUsed) 
FROM NrDailyUsage 
WHERE usageType='Application' 
AND productLine='APM' 
FACET consumingAccountName,consumingAccountId,apmAppName,hostId 
SINCE 1 day ago 
LIMIT 2000

Instance-hours per application

This query measures the total number of hours used by all instances (processes) of an application in the last 24 hours. It's useful for determining which applications are responsible for APM usage, but does not return results that match precisely how New Relic prices APM usage.

Each application instance is counted separately in this query, even if it runs concurrently with another application instance on the same host, so the number of application instance-hours is likely to be greater than the number of host-hours (the billable quantity).

SELECT sum(apmHoursUsed) 
FROM NrDailyUsage 
WHERE usageType='Application' 
AND productLine='APM' 
FACET consumingAccountName,consumingAccountId,apmAppName 
SINCE 1 day ago 
LIMIT 2000

Agent version information

Use this query to see which agent versions are running on your applications in the last 24 hours. This information can be useful in determining whether the agent needs to be upgraded to report a more accurate host name in a Docker container environment (either a Linux boot ID or a cloud provider instance ID).

FROM NrDailyUsage 
SELECT count(*) 
WHERE productLine='APM' 
AND usageType='Application' 
FACET consumingAccountId, consumingAccountName, apmAppName, apmAgentVersion, apmLanguage 
SINCE 1 day ago 
LIMIT 2000

Account hierarchy

This query is useful for seeing the account hierarchy (partnership, master, sub-accounts).

SELECT count(*) 
FROM NrDailyUsage 
FACET partnershipName,masterAccountName,masterAccountId,consumingAccountName,consumingAccountId 
LIMIT 2000 
SINCE 1 day ago

Legacy per-host usage report

This query produces a close approximation of the CSV report you would have seen in the deprecated UI system:

FROM NrDailyUsage 
SELECT consumingAccountId 
AS 'Account ID', hostId, cloudProvider 
AS 'Host provider', cloudInstanceType 
AS 'Instance type', apmBillingInstanceSize 
AS 'Instance size', apmHoursUsed 
AS 'Hours used', apmComputeUnits 
AS 'Usage (CU)', apmMemoryBytes/(1024*1024*1024) 
AS 'Total RAM', apmProcessorCount 
AS 'Logical processors', apmContainerCount 
AS 'Container count', apmComputeUnitRule 
AS 'Business rule', missingCpuData, missingRamData, instanceSizeCapped, cloudZone, cloudInstanceId 
WHERE productLine='APM' 
AND usageType='Host' 
SINCE 1 day ago 
LIMIT 2000

This NRQL query is different than the legacy usage report:

Per-host query	Comments
Time period	This query includes only the last 24 hours of usage. To see the usage aggregated over a longer time period, change the SINCE clause.
Results limited to a maximum number of rows	NRQL limits the number of rows returned. If you have more hosts than the maximum number of rows returned and want to get the complete set of hosts, you can narrow your query with more WHERE clauses to return subsets of the data (for example WHERE cloudInstanceId LIKE “%0”) to divide the data into up to 16 groups, modulo the last character in the AWS instance ID.
Docker container IDs	A single Docker container ID does not appear in this report. A Docker container ID is reported only at the application instance level of granularity (usageType='Application'). For the host (usageType='Host'), a count of unique containers is reported, since there are often very many. While choosing just one container ID to report for a host had been informative, now there is more data reported at the appropriate level of granularity.
Business rule	Business rule has been replaced with other attributes. It no longer is used to describe whether the agent needs to be updated.

Legacy host usage report (application listing)

This query returns data once provided in the "host usage report": a listing of applications running on each host. Note that while APM usage is counted on an hour-by-hour basis, per-hour usage data is no longer available via the API or UI.

FROM NrDailyUsage 
SELECT min(timestamp) 
AS 'Earliest reporting day',max(timestamp) 
AS 'Latest reporting day' 
FACET apmAppName,hostId,agentHostname,consumingAccountName,consumingAccountId 
WHERE usageType='Application' 
AND productLine='APM' 
SINCE 1 month ago 
LIMIT 2000

Use of Docker and other containers

Some previous New Relic APM agents may miscount containers as hosts, which may lead to over-reporting of host-based usage.

To fix this calculation for Linux-based containers (including Docker), upgrade your APM agent to these versions:

• Go: 1.11 or higher
• Java: 3.42.0 or higher
• .NET: 6.19.330.0 or higher
• Node.js: 2.1.0 or higher
• PHP: 7.5.0.199 or higher
• Python: 2.90.0.75 or higher
• Ruby: 4.4.0.336 or higher

For more help