How to better integrate New Relic with your application on Acquia Cloud

Introduction

New Relic provides a number of products which allow a deep understanding of an application's performance over time. This can be seen from both a back-end request perspective (with New Relic APM), as well as front-end requests (with New Relic Browser).  Additionally, New Relic Synthetics can help continuously check the health of a particular journey through a website (including form submissions), and New Relic Alerts can help highlight active problems with systems that are instrumented with the wider suite of products. New Relic Insights allows custom charts of data to be developed using the underlying data (utilizing a custom query language called NRQL), and finally New Relic One allows dashboards to be generated based on those custom charts and data from any of the other products.

When enabled on an application, New Relic APM is loaded as a PHP extension and is able to sample transactions locally. These aggregate statistics on the underlying execution path are then sent back anonymized to the centralized New Relic platform for charting and analysis in batches on a regular basis by the PHP agent/extension. 

New Relic Browser uses a Javascript based RUM (Real User Monitoring) agent which is either injected by the APM PHP extension to each request, or is loaded manually by the application.  There may be occasions, particularly if you are building either API based responses, or have a theme which mustn't have JS loaded (like AMP), where you do not want this JS to be injected. Rather than disabling it entirely you can selectively disable the RUM JS, see Disabling New Relic agent injection for how to achieve this.  

New Relic on Acquia Cloud

Simply enabling New Relic APM (see Configuring performance monitoring tools) provides a good level of information on an applications health and overall performance, and with the default instrumentation that Acquia adds to requests we can see some Drupal specific information in the Transaction charts and analysis.  But to fully realize the integration with New Relic a number of additional configurations can be applied to the application codebase, and via deployment processes, to enable more insight into the running application.  

We have documented some of these additional integrations in the following articles:

• Using New Relic monitoring in a multisite environment

• Profile Drush commands in New Relic

• Setting up New Relic Deployment Markers

• Using New Relic to troubleshoot site issues

Additionally there is an unofficial (not endorsed by Acquia or New Relic) New Relic APM module for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 which provides some additional features, some of which overlap with the above suggestions, but may also prove useful. In addition the New Relic Transactions module can also be used to improve the data visible from Drupal in New Relic, specifically routes, bundles and roles.

Note
New Relic Stack Tracing, New Relic Logs, or New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring - these products are not compatible with Acquia Cloud at this time.