Get to know the New Relic platform

Some New Relic organizations have more than one account. The account switcher in the top right shows you which account you're in and lets you switch between them. By default, we show you all the accounts you have access to in your organization.

To get a sense of how your entire system is doing, click All entities. We use the term entity to refer to something New Relic monitors, whether that's an application, a host, a database service, or something else.

When you click All entities, you're in what we call the entity explorer view, also know as the entity list view. See how List is selected in the upper right?

This view shows you a synopsis of all the things you're monitoring, broken up into categories (learn about these categories). If you have many monitored entities, it may show you only a few in each category, with a priority on those that have had alerting incidents. For any category, you can click View all to see more entities in that category.

Note you can also scroll up and down the left-side entity category menu, as another way to browse all the things you monitor.

From this view, you can switch to the Navigator and Lookout experiences, which are also helpful for understanding your entire system at a glance. Learn more about these high-level views of your system.

New Relic Navigator is meant to give you a more visual overview of your system based on alerting status. Hover over various entities to see more detail about their status. Learn more about Navigator.

We also have New Relic Lookout, which is another visual way to quickly see how your whole system is doing. This is focused on changes in performances: it draws your attention to entities that have undergone significant shifts in important metrics. Learn more about Lookout.

If you ever want help for a New Relic UI experience, just go up to the top of the page and click the ? icon. That will show you some docs about the specific UI experience you're in.

New Relic also has a powerful search functionality. To search, click Quick Find on the left. Whatever you search for, it'll show you where that word appears in different places, such as in your monitored services, in your monitored hosts, in your custom dashboards, and more. The more stuff you're monitoring with New Relic, the more you'll likely be using the search button. For more about how search works, see Search.

All New Relic charts have various options available, including options for sharing with teammates, options for creating alerts for the metric shown in a chart, and options for seeing and editing a chart's underlying query. Learn more about chart options.

One of the most powerful aspects of New Relic is how it lets you tie together all the components in your system and understand how they're connected. Let's look at a few features related to that.

Distributed tracing

Distributed tracing is powerful for helping you dig down into a specific kind of transaction and see the various calls and components involved in that activity. For more on using this feature, see Distributed tracing.

There are a few ways to get to distributed tracing:

• For global distributed tracing, go to: one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Traces. This shows you traces from across your accounts and entities.

• Entity-specific tracing. You can also go to a specific monitored entity (for example, an APM-monitored app) and click Distributed tracing there. That shows you traces that involve that specific entity.

  

  Service maps

  When you're in the UI for a specific monitored entity, you can click Service map to see a visual map of how that service relates to other monitored entities. For more details, see Service maps.

  

  Workloads

  Our workloads feature lets you group together related entities in ways that make sense to your business. This becomes more and more important the bigger your organization is. Here's one of the UI pages you can find in a workload: a map showing the workload entities.

  

Learning how to query your data will help you get the most out of New Relic. We give you a lot of out-of-the-box UI experiences, but to optimize your observability endeavors you'll likely want to bring in some custom data and make some custom dashboards.

Our query builder uses NRQL: New Relic query language. You don't have to learn NRQL yet. Once you're feeling comfortable with New Relic and are ready to unlock more of its power, you can start exploring our NRQL docs.

You can also explore your data without needed to know NRQL. Go to the Metrics and events explorer to get a visual interface for understanding your data.

In the lower left corner, you've got your user menu, which gives you access to more administrative options, including options for managing your data and your users. For docs on the options available there, see Account settings.