Respond to errors and incidents faster with real-time streaming for APM events

In today’s marketplace, digital commerce drives substantial competition and revenue growth for organizations of all sizes. In 2018, digital retail accounted for over $500 billion in the U.S. alone. And a significant portion of that revenue was generated during peak events, like holiday shopping. In fact, Cyber Monday 2019 was the largest online shopping day of all time in the U.S, as retailers raked in a cool $9.4 billion. If you break it down, that’s an average of almost $109,000 per second!

But if the technology stack supporting a company’s digital commerce goes haywire during a critical event, it can be costly. With so much on the line, DevOps and SRE teams must be able to rapidly find, diagnose, and resolve issues in their software before they impact customer experience. During big launches and peak events like Black Friday, teams need dashboards that populate application performance data in real time,  so they can respond to errors in seconds, not minutes.  

This is why New Relic is excited to introduce real-time streaming for APM events. With real-time streaming, your APM event data is sent to New Relic every five seconds, roughly 12 times faster than before. 

Instantly respond to incidents and errors

Observability data must be available as soon as it occurs. Real-time streaming data allows you to respond immediately to failure conditions and anomalies during peak business events and software deployments, and it also helps you respond more quickly to incidents. 

In fact, with real-time streaming you can now see your events in New Relic One near instantaneously. Any APM event data—excluding span events—that you see in New Relic One dashboards (or in New Relic Insights) will be available in real time. 

When you select a time window of five minutes or less, your charts will refresh every five seconds, providing you with a constant stream of new data. This real-time stream of data allows you to move faster with confidence, rapidly recover from incidents, respond to demand surges, and react to surprising changes in business metrics, which is especially important during peak events. 

How to get started with real-time streaming in APM

Real-time streaming is available for all APM agents, at no additional cost. To get started, simply update your APM agents to the latest version. 

To be sure your charts refresh every five seconds, you’ll need to add a "SINCE 5 minutes ago" clause to your NRQL query in chart builder or Insights. 

For charts that use a TIMESERIES clause, you can specify the bucket size as an optional argument to the TIMESERIES clause to determine the refresh interval. For example, the clause SINCE 30 minutes ago TIMESERIES 5 seconds will display a 30-minute window at a five-second resolution.  (For more on how these intervals are calculated, see the New Relic documentation on the TIMESERIES clause ).

Note: At this time, real-time streaming is available only for APM events. Metric, span, transaction trace, and error trace data will continue to report every minute. 

Learn more about real-time streaming and give it a try in New Relic One to ensure your teams are fully prepared for the next peak event, deployment, or incident.