Important

Starting with version 5.9.0 of the New Relic Android agent, you can set a custom user identifier value to associate user sessions with analytics events and attributes. For more information, see the NewRelic.setUserId method.

The Android agent provides an SDK API to set up custom instrumentation for monitoring your application. The API gives you the ability to:

Instrument your own code.
Create, name, and end interaction traces from events in your mobile app.
Record custom metrics.
Send custom attributes and events.
Track networking from libraries not supported automatically.

Install the SDK

Before using the Android SDK API:

Review the Android SDK API release notes to ensure you have your app instrumented with a current SDK for mobile monitoring.
Go to one.newrelic.com, click Add more data and then follow the steps for Android.

For more information, see the detailed Android installation and configuration procedures. If you need to support Android 2.2, see the legacy Android agent SDK procedures.

Instrument your code

Caution

Tracing is heavily optimized, but it does impose a performance overhead. Avoid instrumenting methods that are expected to be called hundreds of times.

If you have custom libraries or application code that you want to include in interaction traces:

Use the following Java annotation:
```
import com.newrelic.agent.android.instrumentation.Trace;
```
Add the @Trace annotation to the methods you want to instrument:
```
@Trace
  public void myHeavyweightMethod() {
  …
```
To indicate what kind of method is being traced, use the optional category attribute.

Automatic instrumentation is one of the agent's more convenient features. However, if it interferes with the method being traced, add @SkipTrace to the method, and the agent will skip it during compile time instrumentation.

Classes	Methods
`Activity`	`onCreate` `onCreateView`
`AsyncTask`	`execute` `executeOnExecutor`
`BitmapFactory`	`decodeFile` `decodeResourceStream` `decodeResource` `decodeByteArray` `decodeStream` `decodeFileDescriptor` `decodeResourceStream`
`SQLiteDatabase`	`query` `queryWithFactory` `rawQuery` `rawQueryWithFactory` `insert` `insertOrThrow` `insertWithOnConflict` `replace` `replaceOrThrow` `delete` `update` `updateWithOnConflict` `execSql`
`GSON`	`toJson` `fromJson`
`JSONObject`	`<init>` `toString`
`JSONArray`	`<init>` `toString`

The category can be a custom name, or it can be one of the predefined MetricCategory enums (listed below). Here is an example of instrumenting an image processing method using the predefined IMAGE category:

@Trace(category = MetricCategory.IMAGE)
public void processImageData() {
…

Available MetricCategory enums include:

MetricCategory	Description
`VIEW_LOADING`	Creating sub views, controls, and other related tasks
`VIEW_LAYOUT`	Inflation of layouts, resolving components
`DATABASE`	SQLite and other file I/O
`IMAGE`	Image loading and processing
`JSON`	JSON parsing or creation
`NETWORK`	Web service integration methods, remote resource loading

Use the API methods

The following table lists all the New Relic Android SDK API calls, ordered by common use cases.

If you want to...	Do this
Track app activity that may be helpful for troubleshooting crashes	See `recordBreadcrumb`.
Track a method as an interaction	See `startInteraction`.
Name or rename an interaction	See `setInteractionName`.
End an interaction	See `endInteraction`.
Disable or enable all interactions	See `withInteractionTracing`.
Set an app version associated with an interaction	See `withApplicationVersion`.
Set custom build ID	See `withApplicationBuild`.
Create custom metrics	See `recordMetric`.
Report custom attributes and events	There are several ways to add custom attributes and events. For more about which would be the best method to use and why, see Add custom data. Create an attribute: `setAttribute` Increment an attribute count: `incrementAttribute` Remove an attribute: `removeAttribute` Remove all attributes: `removeAllAttributes` Record custom event: `recordCustomEvent` Record a breadcrumb event: `recordBreadcrumb` Set the maximum size of an event pool: `setMaxEventPoolSize` Set maximum time agent stores events in memory: `setMaxEventBufferTime` Return the current session's ID: `currentSessionId` Set custom user ID for associating sessions with events and attributes: `setUserId`
Track custom network requests and failures	Use these methods: Record HTTP transactions at varying levels of detail: See `noticeHttpTransaction`. Record network failures: See `noticeNetworkFailure`.
Record a handled exception as an event, including context	See `recordHandledException()`.
Record JavaScript errors from ReactNative apps	See `recordJSErrorException`.
Set app launch time target activity	See `withLaunchActivityName`.
Shut down agent	See `shutdown`.

Manual cross application tracing

The noticeHttpTransaction code does not automatically append the appropriate header ID value needed to get cross application tracing to work. This is why you will not see the application link in your Android app on New Relic's Map page for mobile apps or on the HTTP requests page.

You can use a public method in the New Relic Android SDK to get the appropriate ID to pass along with your HTTP request to your backend application, as long as it is already instrumented by New Relic. The appropriate header ID will be passed from the backend application in the response, providing everything needed for cross application tracing to function.

This example adds the NewRelic-ID to the backend HTTP request, with conn as the external HTTP connection. (Notice the additional import.)

import com.newrelic.agent.android.NewRelic;
import com.newrelic.agent.android.Agent; //required for getCrossProcessId()
...
...

//new method for appending the crossProcessID necessary for CAT in New Relic
public static void setCrossProcessHeader(HttpURLConnection conn) {
    String crossProcessId = Agent.getCrossProcessId(); // API call into the agent for the X-NewRelic-ID
    if (crossProcessId != null) {
        conn.setRequestProperty("X-NewRelic-ID", crossProcessId);
    }
}

After adding the appropriate header to the request to the backend app, the response from the app needs to be parsed for the X-Newrelic-App-Data header, and then added to the noticeHttpTransaction call as a string. For example:

//NewRelic.noticeHttpTransaction(url, httpMethod, statusCode, startTimeMs, endTimeMs, bytesSent, bytesReceived, responseBody, params, response);
//Where xNewRelicAppDataHeader is the value of the X-NewRelic-App-Data header
NewRelic.noticeHttpTransaction("http://api.newrelic.com", "GET", 200, System.nanoTime(), System.nanoTime(),100 ,100, "Test", new HashMap<String, String>(), xNewRelicAppDataHeader);

Android SDK API guide

Important

Install the SDK

Instrument your code

Caution

Automatically instrumented methods

Category attribute example

Use the API methods

Manual cross application tracing

Cross application tracing example