Service maps help you visualize dependencies quickly and easily across your environment. They help you see how all your entities work together across your system. You can use service maps to troubleshoot problems, see how your environment works together, and ensure that issues don't have downstream repercussions.
Service maps also support cross-account access so help you see relationships between entities for all your accounts.
Requirements
Service maps work with distributed tracing to connect relationships between entities. Service maps are still functional if you have not enabled distributed tracing, but we recommend having distributed tracing enabled for all agents. This ensures a more consistent experience while using service maps.
For best results, update existing agents to the latest version. The required minimum agent versions for maps are:
View entity-scoped service maps
You can view service maps from different parts of one.newrelic.com. Once you select an entity to view, you can select service maps from the sidebar.
Each entity displays a color dependent on its performance.
- Green: there are currently no incidents for this entities performance.
- Yellow: there is an open warning incident for this entity.
- Red: there is an open critical incident for this entity.
- Gray: agent not reporting. This means that the agent installed on the entity is not reporting any data. This is expected behavior for databases or externals.
- Orange: anomalous behaviors.
Understand dependencies using API
You can discover the same relationship connections available in service maps with NerdGraph. For more information and examples, see the NerdGraph GraphiQL relationships API tutorial.
Externals and databases in maps
In the New Relic UI, your out-of-process services are referred to as web external or background external data. Externals and databases have slightly different features in service maps than other entity types:
- Unlike other entities that appear in service maps, externals are aggregates. Clicking on an external service in the map shows you the list of all the external services that are rolled up into the one external entity. This is to reduce map clutter, as some entities can have dozens of externals being reported.
- Databases are agentless. Because of this, alerts cannot be set for the database, as only see the service call is reported to New Relic.
Missing nodes
If you are unable to view certain entities in service maps, see Troubleshooting: Missing or obfuscated data.