Introduction to APM | New Relic Documentation

Application performance monitoring (APM) is exactly what it sounds like: monitoring of your web or non-web application's performance. APM supports apps for several programming languages, including Go, Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby, as well as a C SDK.

View the status of all your services at a glance with APM.

Tip

This doc gives you detailed information about why APM matters to your business. But if you want to skip ahead, just sign up for a New Relic account. (It's free, forever!) Then, after you install the agent, you can start working with your data.

Ready to get started?

Start benefiting from APM in five simple steps (and just a few minutes!).

Sign up for a New Relic account (it's free, forever!).
Install and customize the language agent for your app.
Generate some traffic for your app.
Wait a few minutes for New Relic to start receiving your data.
Log in to your account, and start exploring New Relic!

Use the Explorer in New Relic One to access and observe the full stack of your software, including your apps, see performance data and alerting status at a glance, and check relationships. We provide you with a simple, yet powerful visual tool to monitor all your entities, that is, anything we can identify that reports data. In the New Relic ecosystem, entities include basic components like applications, hosts, containers, or database services, but it can also refer to custom groupings of such elements. You can also create your own entities.

If data does not appear after waiting a few minutes, follow the troubleshooting tips for your APM agent.

Identify problems before your users do

Our APM agents report and store the state of your application so you can quickly identify potential problems before they affect your end users. With APM, your DevOps teams don't need to guess whether a performance blocker comes from the app itself, CPU availability, database loads, or something entirely unexpected.

Use our APM solutions to gather both current and historical information about memory usage, CPU utilization, database query performance, web browser rendering performance, app availability, error analysis, external services, and other useful metrics.

Monitor all aspects of your business

Take advantage of these APM features, and more:

Features	Description
App performance at a glance	When you sign in to APM and select an app for your account, use the Summary page to quickly examine relationships across different aspects of your environment; for example: Web transactions response time: Where is the most time being spent? In the request queue, during different stages of page rendering and execution, from external services, or something else? Transaction traces: Which transactions are the slowest, and why? Error rate and throughput: What relationship is there between a spike in errors or slower throughput for a particular time period? Was there a deployment or outage at that time? Hosts: What kind of impact does this have on CPU usage, memory, etc.? Apdex: How are these events affecting customers' satisfaction with the site?
Web and non-web transactions	Start by comparing the top twenty web transactions or non-web transactions in terms of most time consuming, slowest average response time, highest throughput, or worst Apdex. From there, drill down into deeper trace levels for individual transactions, which in turn break down into smaller segments and components, from HTTPS requests on down to SQL queries. Want to explore even deeper? Set up distributed tracing to see how requests move across a distributed system. Select the transactions that are most important to your business (key transactions).
APM and Infrastructure	When your APM and Infrastructure accounts are linked, you will have access to APM data charts on these Infrastructure UI pages: Hosts, Network, Storage, and Processes.
Distributed tracing	Distributed tracing gives you visibility across distributed systems, showing you the path of a request as it travels between services. This feature is especially valuable for large, distributed systems that rely on many small services and microservices.
Logs	Bring your logs and application's data together to make troubleshooting easier and faster. With logs in context, you can see log messages related to your errors and traces directly in your app's UI. You can also see logs in context of your infrastructure data, such as Kubernetes clusters. No need to switch to another UI page in New Relic One.
Service maps	APM's service maps show your app's connections and dependencies, including databases and external services. Health indicators and performance metrics show you the current operational status for every part of your architecture. You can create and customize service maps to visualize and monitor your complex architectures.
Query your data	You can query and visualize your data: Sample and search APM transaction and error data to gain full understanding of the data being collected. Browse your data visually with the data explorer. Create custom SQL-like queries of your data using the New Relic Query Language (NRQL), or using our PromQL-style queries. Use dashboards to build advanced data visualizations, contextualize data, and understand what's going on in your system, real-time.

These are just a few of APM's features. To find out more, see the table of contents for APM.