Your modern software team moves fast. To help keep up the momentum, you’re likely gathering all kinds of data about the performance of your team and its deliverables. One of the best ways to visualize that data is to use New Relic Insights dashboards.
Dashboards tell visual stories about your team’s work. They offer an instant view into the health of your systems, and they help you identify areas that need attention before problems arise. You need to set these views to match your workflows, and that’s why we give you so many ways to visualize the data you capture in New Relic. From billboards to histograms to gauges—you choose the visualizations that best help your team to understand what’s really happening.
To illustrate the capabilities of New Relic Insights dashboards, we’ve built one that includes every possible way to visualize your APM data and pageview data—what we call the All Chart Types dashboard. These visualizations, or charts, come in a variety of formats, or widgets, and they are built using New Relic Query Language (NRQL) queries.
Re-create this dashboard in your own environment to learn how each widget works. It’s a simple process: We supply all the necessary queries, and you should have it up and running in minutes.
Whether you’ve created dozens of dashboards or you're just getting started, or even if you have never once looked at Insights, this is a dashboard you’re going to want to steal.
Build the All Chart Types dashboard
To reproduce the All Chart Types dashboard, you’ll need New Relic APM, New Relic Browser, and New Relic Infrastructure accounts. The dashboard works with the standard New Relic data models and does not require any custom attributes or events.
The result will look something like the following screenshots:
To get started, you need to create a new dashboard in Insights:
- Navigate to newrelic.com, and select the green plus (+) icon next to All dashboards.
- Name your dashboard.
- On the dashboard, click Edit and then click the gear icon Filter enabled.
- Configure the following settings:
- Select Enable filter
- For Event types select PageView
- For Attributes set countryCode
- To add a widget and chart to your dashboard, run a NRQL query to populate the relevant data you want to visualize. For our All Chart Types dashboard, we’ve provided the relevant queries and an explanation of what each one does. Cut and paste them into your Insights query bar.
| Chart Type | Definition | NRQL query |
|---|---|---|
| Chart TypeComparison billboard | DefinitionCompare the number of pageviews this week with last week. | NRQL querySELECT count(*) FROM PageView SINCE 1 hour ago COMPARE WITH 1 week ago |
| Chart TypeAttribute sheet | DefinitionDisplay the total number of pageviews, unique sessions, and the maximum page-load duration from the past hour. | NRQL querySELECT count(*), uniqueCount(session), max(duration) FROM PageView SINCE 1 hour ago |
| Chart TypeTotal page views billboard | DefinitionDisplay the total pageviews in the last hour. | NRQL querySELECT count(*) FROM PageView SINCE 1 hour ago |
| Chart TypePage load duration (per location) histogram | DefinitionDisplay a histogram of the page-load duration for a specific location (in this example, California). | NRQL querySELECT histogram(duration) FROM PageView where countryCode IN ('CA', 'US') SINCE YESTERDAY |
| Chart TypeUnique sessions facet pie chart | DefinitionDisplay a pie chart, which can be faceted, showing the number of unique sessions per country. | NRQL querySELECT uniqueCount(session), average(duration) FROM PageView FACET countryCode LIMIT 10 SINCE YESTERDAY |
| Chart TypeTotal pageviews bar chart | DefinitionDisplay a bar chart, which can be faceted, showing the total number of pageviews per country. | NRQL querySELECT count(*) from PageView facet countryCode |
| Chart TypePageload duration heatmap | DefinitionDisplay a heatmap of page-load durations, faceted by page URL. | NRQL querySELECT histogram(duration) from PageView facet pageUrl |
| Chart TypePageview gauge | DefinitionDisplay the total number of pageviews. | NRQL querySELECT count(*) from PageView |
| Chart TypeRelated-events funnel | DefinitionDisplay a funnel that evaluates a series of related events that are the steps toward a specified goal. | NRQL querySELECT funnel(user, where name = 'Controller/applications/index' as 'App Index', where name = 'Controller/applications/show' as 'App Detail', where name = 'Controller/traced_errors/index' as 'Errors') from PageView |
| Chart TypeDuration line-chart comparison | DefinitionCompare yesterday’s duration times with duration times from today. | NRQL querySELECT average(duration) FROM PageView SINCE yesterday TIMESERIES auto COMPARE WITH 1 day ago |
| Chart TypeTimeseries-view area chart | DefinitionShow a timeseries view of today’s average page-load durations. | NRQL querySELECT average(duration) FROM PageView SINCE yesterday TIMESERIES auto |
| Chart TypePage-load line chart | DefinitionDisplay average duration and percentiles from today’s page loads. | NRQL querySELECT average(duration), percentile(duration, 50, 90) FROM PageView SINCE yesterday TIMESERIES auto |
| Chart TypeUniques list | DefinitionDisplay a stacked chart of the total number of pageviews faceted by country. | NRQL query |
| Chart TypePageviews stacked chart | DefinitionDisplay a stacked chart of the total number of pageviews faceted by country. | NRQL querySELECT count(*) FROM PageView FACET countryCode TIMESERIES auto since yesterday |
| Chart TypeSingle pageview attributes chart | DefinitionDisplay the available attributes for a single pageview event. | NRQL querySELECT * FROM PageView limit 1 |
| Chart TypeNumber of sessions and average duration facetable table | DefinitionDisplay a facetable table showing the unique number of sessions and average duration per country. | NRQL querySELECT uniqueCount(session), average(duration) FROM PageView FACET countryCode LIMIT 10 SINCE YESTERDAY |
| Chart TypeNumber of sessions and average duration multi-facetable table | DefinitionDisplay a facetable table showing the unique number of sessions and average duration per country and city. | NRQL querySELECT uniqueCount(session), average(duration) FROM PageView FACET countryCode, city LIMIT 10 SINCE YESTERDAY |
| Chart TypePageview event table | DefinitionDisplay a table of the most recent events captured by PageView. |
NRQL querySELECT * FROM PageView limit 10 |
| Chart TypeMaximum page load for a specified time period | DefinitionDisplay the maximum page-load duration captured for the default time period. | NRQL querySELECT max(duration) from PageView |
| Chart TypeEvent feed | DefinitionDisplay events in a feed. | NRQL querySELECT * FROM InfrastructureEvent |
| Chart TypeRaw JSON | DefinitionDisplay an event in its raw JSON format. | NRQL querySELECT * FROM PageAction |
(Refer to the Insights chart types documentation for more about each chart type.)
Share your dashboard with the community, and win!
On November 26th, 2018, New Relic will kick off our Shared Dashboards contest. You’ll have two weeks to enter by sharing your most useful queries, Insights charts, and dashboards in the Explorers Hub.
Something for everyone who shares
There are two chances to win a New Relic branded Apple Watch, but everyone gets something for sharing:
- One Apple Watch winner will be selected by you via a community vote.
- A second Apple Watch winner will be selected by the New Relic team.
- Everyone who shares a dashboard will earn a New Relic Developer Program t-shirt and a contest badge.
To help get you started and provide more inspiration, our dashboard experts will be sharing a Dashboard of the Day, complete with the NRQL queries that you can use to create these same dashboards in your own environments.
Get ready to tell your story and share your dashboards. You could win big!
The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub (discuss.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on such sites.
