Top 10 New Relic APM Best Practices Every Enterprise Needs to Know

[David Hennessy]

Are you ready to become a New Relic APM master—and a key asset to your entire team?

To help you reach this vaunted status, we’ve put together a free, informative checklist of the Top 10 New Relic APM Best Practices. Download our checklist to learn the APM tips and tricks that can help you to get the most out of New Relic and achieve “master” status.

The best practices covered include the following:

1. Standardize application-naming conventions

It’s important to give each of your applications a descriptive identifier as soon as you deploy them. If you don’t specify a name in your New Relic configuration file, most New Relic agents will provide a default name, such as “My Application” or “PHP Application.” Failing to specify a specific name each time can lead to multiple instances of the same name, making it more difficult to keep track of which app is which.

New Relic recommends standardizing your application-naming conventions to keep things consistent. For example, all apps in Staging should have names appended with [staging]. And ideally you want your new Java apps named automatically rather than manually. To learn how to do this, follow these steps.

NOTE: There are no automatic naming methods for non-Java applications, so refer to the documentation for your agent.

2. Add labels to your applications

In addition to standardized names, add labels to your apps so that you can segment them into logical groups. Because each application can span multiple environments (development, test, pre-production, etc.), adding labels can make it easier to find a specific app in your overview dashboard.

Two useful labels would be the application’s name and environment. So, for example, if you wanted to view the billing application in Test, you could filter by “billing app” (name label) and “test” (environment label). Labels can also be added to servers.

Adding and assigning a new label is simple:

1. From the New Relic APM menu bar, select Applications. Or, from the New Relic Servers menu bar, select Servers.
2. From the Applications or Servers index, select Show Labels > On.
3. To assign an app or server to a category, select the circled plus icon by its name.
4. Follow the guidelines to type the label; use the format Category:Value.
5. To save the new label, press Enter or Return.

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This is just a quick taste of the helpful information in the free checklist, New Relic APM Best Practices: The Top 10 That Every Enterprise Needs to Know. Download it today for more details on these two best practices and eight more equally useful tips and tricks.

Want more user tips?

• Watch informative webcasts from New Relic University.
• Check out our Tutorials page.
• Read the documentation.
• Ask a question in the New Relic Community Forum.