Introducing New Relic APM 360

Application performance monitoring (APM) is essential for maintaining the reliability and performance of modern distributed, microservices-based applications deployed in the cloud. But when traditional APM tools are used with modern architectures, you’ll often have to deal with challenges such as data silos, lack of context, and blind spots that slow down incident resolution. 

Today we’re launching New Relic APM 360, the next evolution of APM, which eliminates these limitations by providing your teams with a unified view of essential telemetry across your application stack and development lifecycle, empowering you with the daily insights and workflows you need to improve application health and performance. Now all engineers, regardless of role and experience, can understand upstream and downstream impacts of issues, discover emerging trends, and prevent issues before they manifest.

With New Relic APM 360, any cross-functional team (including dev, ops, and security) can:

• Prevent issues with an at-a-glance view of application health. 
• Debug faster with a full-stack view coupled with user and business context.
• Eliminate monitoring gaps with guided workflows and data recommendations.

Prevent issues with at-a-glance app health

New Relic APM 360 offers real-time insights into critical health indicators across the entire stack and application development lifecycle all in one place using APM summary tiles. This includes information on issues, deployments, service levels, and vulnerabilities that are crucial for monitoring overall service health and early identification of emerging issues. Users now have continuous access to all essential information in one place without having to switch screens.

For example, the Gateway service’s summary tiles (in the previous screenshot) provide this information:

• Issue tile: Indicates 1 critical alert for the Gateway service that requires attention. By clicking into the issue, you can uncover a spike in transaction time, which triggered the alert.
• Deployment tile: Shows a 19% drop in error rate and a 55% drop in response time after the last deployment. This suggests that the deployment did not negatively affect the Gateway service's performance.
• Service level tile: Currently empty, indicating that service levels are not set up for Gateway. This places the Gateway service at risk of falling short of meeting SLAs.
• Vulnerability tile: Highlights one high vulnerability for the Gateway service that needs assessment and mitigation to prevent security issues.

By leveraging the information presented in the summary tiles, you can make informed decisions on where to focus your attention and take required actions to ensure optimal application performance and security. In the case of the Gateway service, addressing the critical alert and vulnerability should be the priority, as they are likely to impact the service’s health and performance.

Troubleshoot faster with a unified, full-stack view 

New Relic APM 360 takes monitoring to the next level by intelligently integrating infrastructure insights, error user impact, log patterns, and distributed traces with golden signals. This eliminates guesswork and makes troubleshooting intuitive and efficient for all engineers regardless of their expertise. You can now correlate application performance with upstream and downstream trends to understand how issues affect other parts of your application in real time.

Integrated infrastructure in APM

The new infrastructure monitoring experience in APM 360 connects the dots across your hosts and services, making it easy to identify under provisioned resources that are impacting your services. It helps you navigate seamlessly up and down your stack, so you can easily identify and analyze the interaction between your hosts and the applications running on top of them. 

To illustrate the effectiveness, consider the previous scenario where the Gateway service received an alert due to a spike in transaction time. By examining the CPU and memory metrics within the integrated infrastructure table in APM summary (as shown in the next screenshot), you can quickly eliminate infrastructure as the root cause of this performance issue.

Streamline troubleshooting with the unified view of distributed traces*

Distributed traces play a pivotal role in streamlining troubleshooting. They offer invaluable insights into the behavior and performance of complex, distributed systems. By viewing distributed traces alongside APM telemetry, you can efficiently identify the root cause of issues impacting your service. With just a few clicks, you can navigate to the relevant trace and gain a comprehensive understanding of the problem. 

For an example, let’s use the same scenario from before where the transaction time of the Gateway service is increasing despite no recent deployments on the service and no apparent issues with the underlying infrastructure. 

The distributed traces component of APM 360 expedites troubleshooting. When you examine the distributed trace insight in the APM summary (as shown in the next screenshot), it becomes clear that latency and error rates from the ACME service are affecting the Gateway service.

By selecting the related service, you can observe that the downstream ACME service's latency has surged, directly affecting the Gateway service. (See the next screenshot.) To delve deeper into the distributed trace, simply select View trace.

With the unified view of distributed traces in APM 360, you can quickly isolate problematic services and accelerate the resolution of issues. 

Enhance user experience with error user impact

APM 360 goes beyond raw error metrics to impact analytics. With APM 360, you can now view error user impact in addition to error rate, so you can identify and prioritize errors that have the biggest impact on your users and improve the overall user experience of your application.

Continuing the example scenario described earlier, you notice the ACME service has been impacting the Gateway service’s performance. Drilling down further into the ACME service (as shown in the next screenshot), you notice the error rate has spiked up after a deployment. With the error user impact you can identify that the builtins:TimeoutError has the highest impact on users, so you prioritize it for troubleshooting.

Gain faster insights with contextualized log patterns*

Along the same lines as error user impact, log patterns are the fastest way to discover value in log data without searching.  Searching can quickly lead to logs that provide a root cause explanation, but most data is repetitive and hard to contextualize when browsing. Patterns can make log data discoverable without spending a lot of time reading through low value data. 

APM 360 includes log patterns in the log chart in addition to log types as part of the  all-in-one view making it easy to find the root cause of issues. In the next screenshot, you can see 50k of the logs captured for the ACME service have a string pattern GET <*> HTTP 1.1 that isn’t related to the errors that are root causes in the ACME service. So you can safely disregard these logs, focusing your attention on other logs that are more pertinent to troubleshooting and issue resolution.

APM 360 offers a unified full stack view that allows for real-time correlation of application performance with upstream and downstream trends. This comprehensive visibility enables engineers at all levels of expertise to understand how issues impact various components of the application and speeds up troubleshooting. 

Eliminate blindspots with guided workflows and data recommendations 

To enhance your observability practices, APM 360 helps you address monitoring gaps and shift to always-on monitoring. It guides you through the process of discovering uninstrumented services, missing alerts, SLOs, and vulnerabilities, ensuring that nothing important goes unnoticed and you can identify issues you were previously unaware of.  

Here are two scenarios where APM 360 uncovers monitoring gaps:

• Missing SLOs: This screenshot highlights the absence of service levels for the Gateway service.

• Instrumentation gaps: APM 360 brings to light the lack of infrastructure instrumentation within the Billing service.

With these insights, APM 360 ensures you have a comprehensive view of your monitoring landscape, so you can address shortcomings and strengthen your observability framework.

Empowering all engineers to excel

New Relic APM 360 is not just about monitoring— it's about enabling all engineers, regardless of expertise level, to excel at using APM tools. By providing a holistic view of service health and key application indicators, APM 360 will equip you with the insights you need to ensure your application's performance and health, prevent issues, and make a real impact on your business outcomes.