The New Relic Java agent instruments your Java application automatically, giving you visibility into transactions, errors, and JVM performance without changing your application code. Once installed, you can see your app's response times, throughput, error rates, and JVM health in the New Relic platform within minutes. Use the Java agent to find performance bottlenecks, diagnose errors in context, and understand how your application behaves under real traffic.
Capabilities
- Metrics — Response time, throughput, error rate, Apdex score, and JVM metrics (heap, garbage collection, thread counts) per application and transaction
- Events — Transaction events, error events, and custom events queryable via NRQL
- Logs — Application log data correlated with traces and errors via logs in context
- Traces — Distributed traces linking requests across services, plus transaction traces and SQL explain plans for slow queries
- Entities — Your application appears as a service entity in New Relic, visible in APM & services and the entity explorer
Choose your install path
- App servers and standalone JVM (recommended) — The standard path for Tomcat, Spring Boot, JBoss/WildFly, Glassfish, Jetty, WebLogic, WebSphere, and any JVM that accepts a
-javaagentargument - Maven — Use when your build already uses Maven; the agent is downloaded and unpacked as a build dependency via
maven-dependency-plugin - Gradle — Use when your build already uses Gradle; download tasks powered by
de.undercouch.downloadfetch and unpack the agent automatically - Azure App Service (Windows) — Use when your Java app runs on Azure Windows App Service; the New Relic site extension injects the agent without modifying your startup script
- Docker — Use for containerized Java applications; pass
-javaagentviaJAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS - AWS Elastic Beanstalk — Use for Tomcat or Java SE apps deployed on Elastic Beanstalk
- Google App Engine — Use for apps running in the GAE flexible environment via a custom Docker runtime
- AWS Lambda — Uses a different install path than the standard agent; see serverless function monitoring
Guided installation
Guided installation is available at one.newrelic.com → Integrations & Agents → Java. The UI provides a guided end-to-end workflow that pre-fills your license key and app name.
Installation at a glance
- Check compatibility and requirements
- Download and place the agent files
- Configure the agent with your license key and app name
- Verify data is flowing to New Relic
Next: install and configure
Select the install path that matches your environment: