New Relic

New Relic is an application performance monitoring (APM) tool used to monitor the code and browser performance for WordPress environments or for Node.js environments. To enable New Relic, create a VIP Support ticket request.

• Enabling New Relic is opt-in.
• In some applications New Relic can introduce an increase in CPU and memory usage by about 10% on traced requests.

Adding and removing users

Only the VIP Support team can add or remove a user’s access for a VIP environment’s New Relic dashboard.

To provide users with access to the New Relic dashboard, create a VIP Support ticket and include the email address for the new user(s). There is no limit to the number of users that can be added.

It is the responsibility of the customer to create a VIP Support ticket requesting that a user’s access is removed.

New Relic plan and licenses

The VIP team may use New Relic to perform various analyses or investigations on a customer’s behalf in order investigate an issue reported by the customer or by VIP’s site monitoring tools. For this reason, licenses from VIP’s New Relic account must be used for monitoring, rather than a customer’s, to ensure that the VIP team has access to the New Relic dashboard.

VIP’s New Relic plan includes:

• Web Pro Annual: This includes PHP application monitoring that covers WordPress application code, and Node.js application monitoring that covers Node.js application code.
• Mobile Lite
• Insights Free
• Browser Lite
• Synthetics Lite

The differentiation mainly affects the retention of monitoring data, with Pro elements retaining data for longer than Lite elements.

Security and obfuscation

Due to the possibility of exposing private attributes of requests, some of the query parameters are intentionally obfuscated in New Relic’s UI. In those cases, some values will be represented by question marks or no query params in traces or database queries will appear. Some of these can be selectively re-enabled, but with great caution. Only allow the values of query parameter keys that are always innocuous.

Uses and capabilities

New Relic provides the ability to observe custom application code that is running, and traces that provide insights to performance or functionality issues in application code or in WordPress core code.

New Relic is a helpful tool for understanding average response times for different URL routes in an application, and to identify anomalies such as slow queries, slow remote requests, or generally slow URL routes.

New Relic also provides the ability to:

• Assess overall performance of an application’s backend
• Estimate user happiness with response times (New Relic calls this Apdex)
• Compare against a previous week or other history.
• Enable alerts for changes to the Apdex score.
• Drill into specific parts of the application to see where the bottlenecks are.
• Assess how an application performs during peak traffic times.
• Review traces to identify inefficiencies or slow database queries and correct them.
• Review a sampling of fatal errors and PHP warnings.

A more detailed introduction to New Relic’s APM can be reviewed in New Relic’s documentation.