newrelic

What is newrelic?

The New Relic npm package is a powerful tool for monitoring and managing the performance of your Node.js applications. It provides insights into application performance, error tracking, and user interactions, helping developers to optimize and troubleshoot their applications effectively.

What are newrelic's main functionalities?

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

New Relic APM provides detailed insights into the performance of your application, including response times, throughput, and error rates. By simply requiring the New Relic module at the start of your application, it will automatically start monitoring your app's performance.

const newrelic = require('newrelic');

// Your application code here

// New Relic will automatically monitor your app's performance

Custom Instrumentation

Custom instrumentation allows you to monitor specific parts of your application that are not automatically tracked by New Relic. By using the `getTransaction` method, you can create custom transactions and measure their performance.

const newrelic = require('newrelic');

function myCustomFunction() {
  const transaction = newrelic.getTransaction();
  // Your custom code here
  transaction.end();
}

myCustomFunction();

Error Tracking

New Relic provides error tracking capabilities that allow you to capture and report errors that occur in your application. By using the `noticeError` method, you can send error details to New Relic for further analysis.

const newrelic = require('newrelic');

try {
  // Your code that might throw an error
} catch (error) {
  newrelic.noticeError(error);
}

Custom Events

Custom events allow you to send specific events to New Relic for tracking and analysis. By using the `recordCustomEvent` method, you can create and send custom events with associated data.

const newrelic = require('newrelic');

newrelic.recordCustomEvent('MyCustomEvent', {
  key1: 'value1',
  key2: 'value2'
});

Other packages similar to newrelic

appdynamics

AppDynamics is a comprehensive application performance management (APM) solution that provides real-time monitoring and analytics for applications. It offers similar functionalities to New Relic, including performance monitoring, error tracking, and custom instrumentation. AppDynamics is known for its robust analytics and detailed transaction tracking.

datadog

Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform for cloud applications. It provides APM, log management, and infrastructure monitoring. Datadog offers similar features to New Relic, such as performance monitoring and error tracking, but it also includes extensive support for infrastructure monitoring and log management, making it a more comprehensive solution for full-stack monitoring.

elastic-apm-node

Elastic APM is part of the Elastic Stack and provides performance monitoring for applications. The `elastic-apm-node` package allows you to monitor Node.js applications with features like transaction tracking, error reporting, and custom instrumentation. It integrates seamlessly with other Elastic Stack components, such as Elasticsearch and Kibana, for powerful data analysis and visualization.

README

New Relic for Node.js

This package instruments your application for performance monitoring with New Relic.

This is a new product. You should try it in your staging or development environment first to verify it works for you.

Make sure you have a New Relic account before starting. To see all the features, such as slow transaction traces, you will need a New Relic Pro subscription (or equivalent).

Table of contents

• Getting started
• Transactions and request naming
• Configuration
• Licensing
• Security
• Contributions
• Known issues

Getting started

1. Install node. For now, at least 0.8 is required. Some features (e.g. error tracing) depend in whole or in part on features in 0.10 and above. Development work on the module is being done against the latest released non-development version of Node.
2. Install this module via npm install newrelic for the application you want to monitor.
3. Copy newrelic.js from node_modules/newrelic into the root directory of your application.
4. Edit newrelic.js and replace license_key's value with the license key for your account.
5. Add require('newrelic'); as the first line of the app's main module.

If you wish to keep the configuration for the module separate from your application, the module will look for newrelic.js in the directory referenced by the environment variable NEW_RELIC_HOME if it's set.

When you start your app, New Relic should start up with it and start reporting data that will appear within the New Relic UI after a few minutes. Because the agent minimizes the amount of bandwidth it consumes, it only reports data once a minute, so if you require the module in tests that take less than a minute to run, it won't have time to report data to New Relic. The module will write its log to a file named newrelic_agent.log in the application directory. If New Relic doesn't send data or crashes your app, the log can help New Relic determine what went wrong, so be sure to send it along with any bug reports or support requests.

Transactions and request naming

In order to get the most value out of New Relic for Node.js, you may have to do a little work to help us figure out how your application is structured. New Relic works on the assumption that it can group requests to your application into transactions, which are defined by giving one or more request paths a name. These names are used to visualize where your app is spending its time (in transaction breakdowns), to identify slow requests, and to group scoped metrics. For example, this can identify slow database queries by showing which requests are spending a long time waiting on the database.

If you're using Express or Restify with their default routers and are satisfied with your application being represented by those frameworks' route matchers, you may not need to do anything. However, if you want more specific names than are provided by your framework, you may want to use one or more of the tools described further on.

The simplest way to tell that you need to read further in this document is if you feel too many of your requests are being lumped together under the catch-all name /*. All requests that aren't otherwise named by the module will end up grouped under /*.

Background

If you've been working with Node for a while, you're probably accustomed to thinking of your application's requests in terms of raw URLs. One of the great things about Node is that it makes it so easy and simple to work with HTTP, and that extends to things like parsing URLs and creating your own strategies for naming and routing requests for services like RESTful APIs. This presents a challenge for New Relic, because we need to keep the number of names we're tracking small enough that we can keep the New Relic user experience snappy, and also so we don't overwhelm you with so much data that it's difficult for you to see the problem spots in your applications. URLs are not a good fit for how New Relic sees performance.

Another of Node's great strengths is that it provides a lot of tools that build on top of the http module to simplify writing web services. Unfortunately, that variety greatly complicates things for us, with our limited resources, and so we offer a few different tools to help you give us the information we need to provide you useful metrics about your application:

• we can read the route names from the Express and Restify routers, if you're using them (and as said above, for many of you, this may be all you need)
• we offer an API for naming the current request, either with simple names or, if you prefer, grouped into controllers with actions
• and we support rules stored in your module's configuration that can mark requests to be renamed or ignored based on regular expressions matched against the request's raw URLs (also available as API calls)

Requests are mapped to transaction names using a deterministic process:

1. On an incoming request, the module creates a New Relic transaction that includes the HTTP request method and other metadata. As a fallback (for use in the error tracer), each transaction is named after its raw request URL.
2. When a framework using a supported router is in use, the agent copies the framework name, route path and request method onto the transaction as its transaction name.
3. Within handlers, you can make calls to the module's API to explicitly set the name of the route to whatever you want, or mark the route to be ignored (or explicitly not ignored, see the below discussion of rules). As noted below, the last API call wins when there is more than one.
4. When the transaction is finished (i.e. the response has been completely streamed out to the client), any naming or ignoring rules you have specified in your configuration are applied. NOTE: Older versions of the module only applied these rules if nothing else had named the transaction, which made using rules with router-based automatic naming impossible. You must be using the latest version of New Relic to combine naming and ignoring rules with naming set by the router.
5. Finally, New Relic may have its own rules that it applies to the transaction name, either because the request is for something New Relic rolls up by default (i.e. static assets like images or CSS files), or because New Relic is applying rules to remedy metric grouping issues.
6. If nothing has named the transaction after steps 1-5, the transaction is named /*, which puts that request in the undifferentiated, default bucket for requests. This will typically only happen in situations where your application uses either no framework, or a framework with a router that isn't currently supported by New Relic.

Let's go through the naming tools one at a time.

Router introspection

Express is the most popular web framework in use within the Node community, and a number of important services are also using Restify. Both frameworks map routes to handlers, and both use a similar pattern to do so: they match one or more HTTP methods (e.g. GET or the ever-popular OPTIONS – let's hear it for CORS) along with a potentially parameterized path (e.g. /user/:id) or a regular expression (e.g. /^/user/([-0-9a-f]+)$/). New Relic will capture both those pieces of information in the request name. If you have support for slow transaction traces and have enabled capture_params, the transaction trace will also have the request's parameters and their values attached to it.

The only important thing to know about New Relic's support for Express and Restify is that if you're dissatisfied with the names it comes up with, you can use the API calls described below to come up with more descriptive names. Also, if you use a different web framework or router and would like to see support for it added, please let us know.

Request naming with the module API

The API is what's handed back from require('newrelic'), so

var newrelic = require('newrelic');

is all you need. Please note that you still need to ensure that loading the New Relic module is the first thing your application does, as it needs to bootstrap itself before the rest of your application loads, but you can safely require the module from multiple modules in your application – it will only initialize itself once.

newrelic.setTransactionName(name)

Name the current request. You can call this function anywhere within the context of an HTTP request handler, at any time after handling of the request has started, but before the request has finished. A good rule of thumb is that if the request and response objects are in scope, you can set the name.

Explicitly calling newrelic.setTransactionName() will override any names set by Express or Restify routes. Calls to newrelic.setTransactionName() and newrelic.setControllerName() will overwrite each other. The last call made before the request ends wins.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not include highly variable information like GUIDs, numerical IDs, or timestamps in the request names you create. If your request is slow enough to generate a transaction trace, that trace will contain the original URL. If you enable parameter capture, the parameters will also be attached to the trace. The request names are used to group requests for New Relic's many charts and tables, and those visualizations' value drops as the number of different request names increases. If you have 50 or so different transaction names, you're probably pushing it. If you have more than a couple hundred, you need to rethink your naming strategy.

newrelic.setControllerName(name, [action])

Name the current request using a controller-style pattern, optionally including the current controller action. If the action is omitted, New Relic will include the HTTP method (e.g. GET, POST) as the action. The rules for when you can call newrelic.setControllerName() are the same as they are for newrelic.setTransactionName().

Explicitly calling newrelic.setControllerName() will override any names set by Express or Restify routes. Calls to newrelic.setTransactionName() and newrelic.setControllerName() will overwrite each other. The last one to run before the request ends wins.

See the above note on newrelic.setTransactionName(), which also applies to this function.

Rules for naming and ignoring requests

If you don't feel like putting calls to the New Relic module directly into your application code, you can use pattern-based rules to name requests. There are two sets of rules: one for renaming requests, and one to mark requests to be ignored by New Relic.

If you're using socket.io, you will have a use case for ignoring rules right out of the box. You'll probably want to add a rule like the following:

// newrelic.js
exports.config = {
  // other configuration
  rules : {
    ignore : [
      '^/socket.io/.*/xhr-polling'
    ]
  }
};

This will keep socket.io long-polling from dominating your response-time metrics and blowing out the apdex metrics for your application.

rules.name

A list of rules of the format {pattern : "pattern", name : "name"} for matching incoming request URLs to pattern and naming the matching New Relic transactions name. When automatically naming rules from the router configuration, the patterns are still applied to the URL path, and not the name returned by the router. The pattern can be set as either a string or a JavaScript regular expression literal. Both pattern and name are required. Additional attributes are ignored.

Can also be set via the environment variable NEW_RELIC_NAMING_RULES, with multiple rules passed in as a list of comma-delimited JSON object literals: NEW_RELIC_NAMING_RULES='{"pattern":"^t","name":"u"},{"pattern":"^u","name":"t"}'

rules.ignore

A list of patterns for matching incoming request URLs to be ignored. When using ignoring rules with instrumented routers, the matches are still made against the URL paths, not the name returned by the router. Patterns may be strings or regular expressions.

Can also be set via the environment variable NEW_RELIC_IGNORING_RULES, with multiple rules passed in as a list of comma-delimited patterns: NEW_RELIC_IGNORING_RULES='^/socket\.io/\*/xhr-polling,ignore_me' Note that currently there is no way to escape commas in patterns.

API for adding naming and ignoring rules

newrelic.addNamingRule(pattern, name)

Programmatic version of rules.name above. Naming rules can not be removed until the Node process is restarted. They can also be added via the module's configuration. Both parameters are mandatory.

newrelic.addIgnoringRule(pattern)

Programmatic version of rules.ignore above. Ignoring rules can not be removed until the Node process is restarted. They can also be added via the module's configuration. The pattern is mandatory.

Other API calls

newrelic.setIgnoreTransaction(ignored)

Tell the module explicitly whether or not a given request should be ignored. Allows you to explicitly filter out long-polling routes or requests you know are going to be time-consuming in an uninteresting way, and also allows you to gather metrics for requests that would otherwise be ignored. Note that to prevent a transaction from being ignored with this function, you must pass false as the parameter – in this case null or undefined will be ignored.

newrelic.noticeError(error)

If your app is doing its own error handling with domains or try/catch clauses, but you want all of the information about how many errors are coming out of the app to be centrally managed, use this call. Unlike most of the calls here, this call can be used outside of route handlers, but will have additional context if called from within transaction scope.

The fine print

This is the Node-specific version of New Relic's transaction naming API documentation. The naming API exists to help us deal with the very real problem that trying to handle too many metrics will make New Relic slow for everybody, not just the account with too many metrics. If, in conversation with New Relic Support, you see discussion of "metric explosion", this is what they're talking about.

While we have a variety of strategies for dealing with these issues, the most severe is simply to blacklist offending applications. The main reason for you to be careful in using our request-naming tools is to prevent that from happening to your applications. We will do everything in our power to ensure that you have a good experience with New Relic even if your application is causing us trouble, but sometimes this will require manual intervention on the part of our team, and this can take a little while.

Configuring the module

The module can be tailored to your app's requirements, both from the server and via the newrelic.js configuration file you created. For complete details on what can be configured, refer to lib/config.default.js, which documents the available variables and their default values.

In addition, for those of you running in PaaS environments like Heroku or Microsoft Azure, all of the configuration variables in newrelic.js have counterparts that can be set via environment variables. You can mix and match variables in the configuration file and environment variables freely; environment variables take precedence.

Here's the list of the most important variables and their values:

• NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY: Your New Relic license key. This is a required setting with no default value.
• NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME: The name of this application, for reporting to New Relic's servers. This value can be also be a comma-delimited list of names. This is a required setting with no default value. (NOTE: as a convenience to Azure users, the module will use APP_POOL_ID as the application name if it's set, so you can use the name you chose for your Azure Web Server without setting it twice.)
• NEW_RELIC_NO_CONFIG_FILE: Inhibit loading of the configuration file altogether. Use with care. This presumes that all important configuration will be available via environment variables, and some log messages assume that a config file exists.
• NEW_RELIC_HOME: path to the directory in which you've placed newrelic.js.
• NEW_RELIC_LOG: Complete path to the New Relic agent log, including the filename. The agent will shut down the process if it can't create this file, and it creates the log file with the same umask of the process. Setting this to stdout will write all logging to stdout, and stderr will write all logging to stderr.
• NEW_RELIC_LOG_LEVEL: Logging priority for the New Relic agent. Can be one of error, warn, info, debug, or trace. debug and trace are pretty chatty; unless you're helping New Relic figure out irregularities with the module, you're probably best off using info or higher.

For completeness, here's the rest of the list:

• NEW_RELIC_ENABLED: Whether or not the agent should run. Good for temporarily disabling the agent while debugging other issues with your code. It doesn't prevent the module from bootstrapping its instrumentation or setting up all its pieces, it just prevents it from starting up or connecting to New Relic's servers. Defaults to true.
• NEW_RELIC_ERROR_COLLECTOR_ENABLED: Whether or not to trace errors within your application. Values are true or false. Defaults to true.
• NEW_RELIC_ERROR_COLLECTOR_IGNORE_ERROR_CODES: Comma-delimited list of HTTP status codes to ignore. Maybe you don't care if payment is required? Ignoring a status code means that the transaction is not renamed to match the code, and the request is not treated as an error by the error collector. Defaults to ignoring 404.
• NEW_RELIC_IGNORE_SERVER_CONFIGURATION: Whether to ignore server-side configuration for this application. Defaults to false.
• NEW_RELIC_TRACER_ENABLED: Whether to collect and submit slow transaction traces to New Relic. Values are true or false. Defaults to true.
• NEW_RELIC_TRACER_THRESHOLD: Duration (in seconds) at which a transaction trace will count as slow and be sent to New Relic. Can also be set to apdex_f, at which point it will set the trace threshold to 4 times the current ApdexT.
• NEW_RELIC_APDEX: Set the initial Apdex tolerating / threshold value in seconds. This is more often than not set from the server. Defaults to 0.100.
• NEW_RELIC_CAPTURE_PARAMS: Whether to capture request parameters on slow transaction or error traces. Defaults to false.
• NEW_RELIC_IGNORED_PARAMS: Some parameters may contain sensitive values you don't want being sent out of your application. This setting is a comma-delimited list of names of parameters to ignore. Defaults to empty.
• NEW_RELIC_NAMING_RULES: A list of comma-delimited JSON object literals: NEW_RELIC_NAMING_RULES='{"pattern":"^t","name":"u"},{"pattern":"^u","name":"t"}' See the section on request and transaction naming for details. Defaults to empty.
• NEW_RELIC_IGNORING_RULES: A list of comma-delimited patterns: NEW_RELIC_IGNORING_RULES='^/socket\.io/\*/xhr-polling,ignore_me' Note that currently there is no way to escape commas in patterns. Defaults to empty.
• NEW_RELIC_TRACER_TOP_N: Increase this number to increase the diversity of slow transaction traces sent to New Relic. Defaults to 1. See the description in lib/config.default.js, as this feature is exceedingly hard to summarize.
• NEW_RELIC_HOST: Hostname for the New Relic collector proxy. You shouldn't need to change this.
• NEW_RELIC_PORT: Port number on which the New Relic collector proxy will be listening. You shouldn't need to change this either.
• NEW_RELIC_DEBUG_METRICS: Whether to collect internal supportability metrics for the agent. Don't mess with this unless New Relic asks you to.
• NEW_RELIC_DEBUG_TRACER: Whether to dump traces of the transaction tracer's internal operation. It's unlikely to be informative unless you're a New Relic Node.js engineer and it has a significant performance cost, so use with care.

Security

We take security (and the protection of your and your users' privacy) very seriously. See SECURITY.md for details, but the brief version is that if you feel you've found a security issue in New Relic for Node, contact us at [e-mail].

Contributions

We owe a debt to all of the beta testers and users who have provided us with feedback, and in some cases significant pieces of code. (If you wish to contribute, please see CONTRIBUTING.md in this directory.) In particular, we're indebted to these people:

• Hernan Silberman, for his work on the memcached instrumentation.
• Jeff Howell <[e-mail]>, for coming up with a much simpler way to instrument node-mongodb-native, as well as pointing out a problem with the Connect instrumentation.

Recent changes

Information about changes to the module are in NEWS.md.

Known issues:

• New Relic for Node is only supported on Node.js 0.8 and newer. Some features may behave differently between 0.8, 0.10 and 0.11 / 0.12. The agent is optimized for newer versions of Node.
• There are irregularities around transaction trace capture and display. If you notice missing or incorrect information from transaction traces, let us know.
• There are over 20,000 30,000 40,000 A LOT of modules on npm. We can only instrument a tiny number of them. Even for the modules we support, there are a very large number of ways to use them. If you see data you don't expect on New Relic and have the time to produce a reduced version of the code that is producing the strange data, it will be used to improve the module and you will have the Node team's gratitude.
• The CPU and memory overhead incurred by New Relic for Node is relatively minor (~1-10%, depending on how much of the instrumentation your apps end up using). GC activity is significantly increased while the agent is active, due to the large number of ephemeral objects created by metrics gathering.
• When using Node's included clustering support, each worker process will open its own connection to New Relic's servers, and will incur its own overhead costs.

New Relic features available for other platforms not yet in Node.js

• SSL-protected connections between the module and New Relic
• high-security mode
• Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• cross-application tracing (depends on RUM)
• custom parameters, metrics and instrumentation
• slow SQL traces and explain plans
• garbage collector instrumentation
• thread profiling
• X-ray transactions (depends on thread profiling)
• capacity planning

LICENSE

New Relic for Node is free-to-use, proprietary software. Please see the full license (found in LICENSE in this distribution) for details on its license and the licenses of its dependencies.