New Relic services

New Relic for application performance management (APM) is a software analytics product that helps you analyze and improve application interactions. New Relic APM is available to all Magento Commerce Cloud accounts and provides the following features:

Focus on specific transactions—Actively mark and monitor key customer actions in your site, such as adding to the cart, checking out, or processing a payment.
Database query monitoring—Locate and monitor database queries affecting performance.
App Map—View all application dependencies within your Magento site, extensions, and external services.
Apdex scores—Evaluate performance and create alerts that identify issues and notify you when they occur, such as site performance affected by a flash sale or web event.

For Magento Commerce Cloud Pro accounts, the Production environment includes the New Relic Infrastructure (NRI) service, which automatically connects with the application data and performance analytics to provide dynamic server monitoring.

Your Magento Commerce Cloud account includes the software for the New Relic APM service along with a license key. You do not need to purchase or install any additional software. For Pro accounts, if New Relic APM is not installed on the Staging and Production environments or New Relic Infrastructure is not available in the Production environment, submit a support ticket to request installation.

New Relic account credentials

When Magento provisions your Magento Commerce Cloud project, the Project Owner should receive an email from New Relic with the credentials and instructions for accessing the account. If you did not receive the email, you can use the Project Owner email address to reset the password.

Also, we recommend adding at least one Admin user to your New Relic account to manage all access, integrations, and usage of the tool. Magento Commerce Cloud Project Owners and Admin users can add and remove users from the New Relic account.

To add a user:

Using your Project Owner New Relic credentials, log in to New Relic.
From the account dropdown menu, select Account settings > Account > Users and roles.
Click New user.
Add the name and email address for the account.
Assign the user role: Admin, User, or Restricted.
Click Add user.
Ask the new user to check their email for a New Relic notification with account information.

See Accounts in the New Relic documentation for information about user roles, managing user accounts, and changing account ownership.

Configure New Relic

Pro accounts are preconfigured to use the New Relic service. If you have a Starter account, you need to verify that the New Relic service is configured properly. Check if the .magento.app.yaml file includes the New Relic extension in the runtime list. If not, then add the following:

.magento.app.yaml

runtime:
    extensions:
        - newrelic

Manage license keys

For Pro accounts, there is no need to apply the license key to any environments. This has already been done. You can log in to your New Relic account and verify connectivity.

The Magento Commerce Cloud Starter plan supports up to three instances of a New Relic license across all environments. For Starter projects, we recommend adding a New Relic license key to the Staging and Production (master) environments, and you can add the license key to one other environment of your choice. If you have more than three active environments using the same New Relic license key, you need to remove a license variable from an existing environment.

To find your New Relic license key:

Open your account page.
On the Projects tab, find your project.
Click View Details to see the project plan information.
Expand the NewRelic Service section to view the license key.
Copy the license key.

To add a license key to an environment:

For Starter accounts, you need to use the license key and set a variable in the environment.

Change to the environment that needs the license key.

Set the variable.

magento-cloud variable:set php:newrelic.license <newrelic-license-key>

Adding a variable to an environment triggers a redeployment to update the environment variables and values. See Working with variables.

To remove a license key from an environment:

List environment variables.

magento-cloud vget

Response:

+----------------------+-------------+------------------------+
| Name                 | Level       | Value                  |
+----------------------+-------------+------------------------+
| php:newrelic.license | environment | <newrelic-license-key> |
+----------------------+-------------+------------------------+

If you added the license key as a project variable, you must remove that project-level variable. A project variable adds the license to every environment branch created, which can consume or exceed the license limit. To list project variables: magento-cloud pvget

Delete a variable.

magento-cloud variable:delete php:newrelic.license

Removing a variable from an environment triggers a redeployment to update the environment variables and values. See Working with variables.

Investigate performance

New Relic connects and monitors your site using a PHP agent. As it collects data, you can log in and review the responses through the New Relic dashboard.

Using the New Relic dashboard, you can immediately track and find:

Applications and transactions encountering slow responses or bottlenecks
Customer comments about issues with your site
Applications with high transaction time and follow up on queries, calls, and methods with Blackfire
Traffic to transaction time

We recommend reviewing tracked data:

Most time consuming—Determine time consumption by tracking requests in parallel. For example, you may have the highest transaction time spent in product and category views. If a customer account page suddenly ranks very high in time consumption, there may be a call or query dragging performance.
Highest throughput—Identify pages hit the most based on the size and frequency of bytes transmitted.

All collected data details the time spent on an action transmitting data, queries, or Redis data. If queries cause issues, New Relic provides information to track and respond to it.

To learn more about using and customizing New Relic services for your project, see New Relic Infrastructure documentation

New Relic and Blackfire

You can use the high-level data captured by New Relic APM to see what is happening in your application in realtime. Combine that with the code-level data captured by the Blackfire Profiler to get a comprehensive view of your Magento store performance.

The New Relic worst-case requests are not averages, but edge cases; whereas, Blackfire provides more of the average worst-case requests.
Blackfire is not detailed in determining and displaying queries giving you trouble, but you can use New Relic to find those.
Background processes, like Cron job, can cause issues. These background processes are not monitored by New Relic, but you can watch them using Blackfire.

May 29th, 2019