Introduction to New Relic

We live in the digital age, where data is the new oil. Businesses in the digital age are rolling in excessive amounts of data, unsure of what it all means. Strategic business owners understand the importance of data, but they have no clue how to make sense out of it. A recent article from Forbes stated that 49 percent of business owners say that analytics helps them make better decisions. It also mentions that 16 percent of Entrepreneurs say that it better enables key strategic initiatives in their organization.

So we know that data is important. But how do we collect the right data and analyze it? This is where software like New Relic comes into play. In this blog post. We’ll take a look at what is New Relic and how it can help you make sense of data.

Table of Contents

1. What is New relic?
2. Benefits of New Relic
3. How to use New Relic with .NET application?
4. How to install a .NET agent?
5. What are the different ways to deploy New Relic?
6. Verdict

What is New Relic?

New Relic is a software that allows developers and business owners to understand their applications better using data and other insights. It is a real-time analytics platform that helps you collect important metrics and gain insights from it. New Relic also helps you track events, logs from production software directly.

With this tool, you can have an overview of your digital infrastructure, and service offerings in your application. With accurate data, you can get actionable insights about your software and your customer’s experience using it. You can then use these insights to build a better application/website and thereby create a profitable business.

Benefits of New Relic

There are a variety of uses for New Relic, but these are the fours that are the most important -

View all your data in a single platform

You can import live data from across all your technology stacks and applications. Once imported, you can use New Relic to view it all from one single dashboard.

Analyze your data

Once you sync all your data feed, you will have real-time access to what’s happening over your digital assets. You can view all the data and make informed business decisions from it. You can create charts and graphs to visually analyze all the incoming data, to make significant changes in your business.

You can respond to defects quickly

New Relic has advanced machine learning algorithms that help you detect problems in your asset even before you realize it. It can warn you of any upcoming problems and keep you prepared to diffuse it.

You can create custom New Relic apps

If you have a very specific need, you can also create a custom New Relic app. The platform provides you with tons of resources to help you develop new apps in very little time.

How to use New Relic with .NET application?

New Relic offers APM ( Application Performance Monitoring ) service for .NET applications and services. You can install a .NET agent to get extended support for the .NET framework and .NET Core.

This APM service also supports other .NET compatible languages like VB.NET, C#, and CLI. With New Relic, you can efficiently monitor the performance of all types of .NET applications. However, note that it does not support Microsoft.NET core versions that are earlier than 2.0

With the updated support for .NET, you can monitor apps in highly dynamic or distributed environments. These include-

• Cloud-managed server Virtual Machine images
• On-host Virtual Machine servers
• Microsoft Azure App Services
• Self-hosted Windows and Linux systems
• Amazon AWS EC2 Virtual Machines

How to install a .NET agent?

Before you can install a .NET agent, you need to create your own New Relic account at the start. After this, you need to take a look at the requirements for the .NET framework and the .NET core. Here are the requirements for the .NET framework-

• For a .NET Framework that is 4.5 or higher, you need to install the New Relic .NET agent version that is 7.0 or higher.
• For a .NET Framework that is 4.0 or lower, you must run a version of the New Relic .NET agent that is 7.0 or lower.

You are also required to use an application or web server from any one of these options-

• IIS
• Self-hosted OWIN or WCF
• Kestrel
• Kestrel with IIS reverse proxy via AspNetCoreModule / AspNetCoreModuleV2

As far as operating systems go, you should consider any one of the following listed below-

• Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2012 / 2012 R2
• Windows Server 2016 and 2019
• Windows 10
• Windows Azure (OS Family 1, 2, and 3)

If you’re planning to use any additional monitoring software, we suggest that you don’t. This is because the .NET CLR allows the access of only one profiler to access the profiling API of a process at a given time.

When you run your .NET agent with other monitoring software, it can result in a profiler conflict and send a ton of errors your way.

For more details on .NET framework compatibility, click here. For details on .NET core compatibility, click here.

What are the different ways to deploy New Relic?

You can use New Relic to measure the data in a variety of applications, devices, and infrastructure.

Application Performance Monitoring

You can install native agents to monitor the performance of the application. Some of these native agents are -

• C
• Go
• Java
• .NET
• Node.js
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby

Deploy new relic for Browser Monitoring

You can also install the browser monitoring agent to instrument your application’s webpages. Here are some ways in which you can deploy it -

• Use the APM agent to inject the JavaScript into your webpage
• You can directly Paste the JavaScript snippet into a webpage
• You can Enable single-page app (SPA) monitoring
• You can use the REST API
• You can also use an APM agent API to manually instrument the JavaScript snippet into your webpage

Deploy new relic for infrastructure monitoring

You can deploy new relic to have an overview of your digital infrastructure like

• Linux
• Windows
• Kubernetes
• Prometheus
• On-host integrations
• Cloud integrations like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform

Deploy New relic for mobile monitoring

Finally, you can use New Relic to monitor and manage mobile applications like

• Android
• iOS
• React

Verdict

New Relic is a useful observability platform, designed to help you build better applications. With this platform, you can truly analyze all your digital assets and understand how you can improve it.