Getting Started with New Relic: Installing Your First APM Agent

Observability starts the moment your first agent reports data

New Relic is an observability platform: it collects telemetry from your applications, infrastructure, and users, then helps you ask questions about how everything behaves. This guide gets you from zero to your first live data.

Observability in One Sentence

Monitoring tells you that something is wrong; observability helps you understand why. New Relic does this by unifying four data types — metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) — in one place.

How the Platform Is Organised

  • APM — application performance (response time, throughput, errors)
  • Browser — real user experience in the browser
  • Infrastructure — hosts, containers, and cloud services
  • Dashboards & Alerts — where you visualise and get notified

APM surfaces throughput, latency, and error rate the moment data flows in

Installing an APM Agent

For a Node.js app, the steps are minimal:

npm install newrelic
# set your license key + app name in newrelic.js or env vars
NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME="my-api" NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY=xxxx node -r newrelic index.js

Within a minute or two, your app appears in the APM list with live throughput and response-time charts.

Your First Five Minutes

  1. Open the APM summary and note your baseline response time.
  2. Check the Transactions view to see your slowest endpoints.
  3. Open Errors to confirm nothing is failing silently.

Install agents everywhere early. You can’t investigate an incident with data you never collected.

What to Learn Next

  • Distributed tracing to follow a request across services
  • NRQL to query your telemetry directly
  • Alerts so New Relic tells you before your users do

Arivanandhan Chitheshwaran