Top 50 newrelic interview questions and answers for devops engineer

Top 50 New Relic Interview Questions & Answers for DevOps Engineers

Welcome to this in-depth study guide, meticulously crafted to help DevOps engineers excel in interviews focusing on New Relic. This resource distills complex topics into clear, concise explanations, covering essential New Relic interview questions and providing practical answers. Prepare to confidently discuss application performance monitoring, infrastructure observability, log management, and advanced NRQL concepts, ensuring you're well-equipped for any technical challenge.

Table of Contents

1. Understanding New Relic: Core Concepts for DevOps
2. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Essentials
3. Infrastructure Monitoring and Host Management
4. Synthetics: Proactive Monitoring of User Experience
5. Logs, Errors, and Distributed Tracing with New Relic
6. New Relic Query Language (NRQL) and Dashboards
7. Alerts, Notifications, and Incident Management
8. DevOps Integrations and Automation
9. Troubleshooting and Best Practices in New Relic
10. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
11. Further Reading
12. Conclusion

Understanding New Relic: Core Concepts for DevOps

New Relic is a powerful observability platform crucial for DevOps engineers. It provides a unified view of software and infrastructure performance, helping to understand and optimize systems. Aggregating metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT), it enables faster incident resolution and proactive performance management. Mastering its core components is fundamental for any DevOps role.

Key New Relic Products for DevOps Engineers

Product	Primary Use Case	DevOps Relevance
APM (Application Performance Monitoring)	Monitor applications, identify bottlenecks, trace transactions.	Ensures application health and reliability post-deployment.
Infrastructure	Monitor servers, hosts, containers, and cloud services.	Provides visibility into underlying system resources.
Synthetics	Proactively test application uptime, API endpoints, and user flows.	Detects issues before real users are affected.
Logs	Centralized log management and analysis.	Expedites troubleshooting and error detection.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Essentials

New Relic APM offers deep visibility into an application's health and performance. Agents installed within application code collect detailed metrics. DevOps engineers utilize APM to monitor service levels, pinpoint slow code, and assess deployment impact. Key metrics include throughput, response time, error rate, and external service calls. APM is crucial for maintaining high-performing, reliable applications in production.

Practical Action: Identifying Slow Transactions

To pinpoint slow transactions, navigate to the APM overview for your service. Look for the "Transactions" section, often ordered by "Slowest Average Response Time." Drill down into specific transactions to view detailed traces, which show timing for each request segment, including database and external service calls.

Infrastructure Monitoring and Host Management

New Relic Infrastructure provides observability for your entire ecosystem, from servers to Kubernetes clusters. It gathers real-time data on CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network activity. This helps DevOps teams understand resource utilization and prevent potential outages. It integrates with cloud providers and container orchestrators, correlating application performance with underlying infrastructure health. Effective host management ensures optimal application performance.

Configuring an Infrastructure Agent (Conceptual Example)

Installing the New Relic Infrastructure agent typically involves a package manager or a script. Here’s a conceptual command for Linux:

# Download and install the agent
sudo sh -c "$(curl -L https://download.newrelic.com/infrastructure_agent/scripts/install_infrastructure_agent.sh)" && \
sudo newrelic-infra -license_key YOUR_LICENSE_KEY
    

This agent will report host metrics to your New Relic account. Always consult official New Relic documentation for current installation instructions.

Synthetics: Proactive Monitoring of User Experience

New Relic Synthetics enables proactive monitoring of application and API availability from global locations. These automated tests simulate user interactions, detecting issues before actual users encounter them. This pre-emptive approach is vital for maintaining a positive user experience and achieving service level objectives. Monitor types include ping checks, browser monitors for full user journeys, and API tests. Synthetics ensures critical business transactions function as expected.

Action Item: Setting up a Scripted Browser Monitor

A Scripted Browser monitor uses a script (similar to Selenium) to navigate your application, click elements, and assert expected outcomes. This simulates a user's journey, like a login or checkout process. Configure it to run from multiple geographical locations to detect region-specific performance issues.

Logs, Errors, and Distributed Tracing with New Relic

New Relic offers centralized log management, allowing DevOps engineers to collect, process, and analyze logs from all sources. This streamlines troubleshooting and speeds up root cause analysis. Paired with error analytics, patterns in errors across applications and infrastructure are quickly identified. Distributed tracing is crucial for understanding request flow in microservices. It visualizes transaction paths, highlighting latency at each service hop. Together, MELT provides comprehensive observability.

Example: Sending Custom Logs to New Relic (Conceptual)

Many logging libraries can send logs to New Relic via a log forwarder or direct API. Here’s a conceptual Python example using a New Relic-compatible logging handler:

import logging
import newrelic.agent

# Assume New Relic agent is initialized
# newrelic.agent.initialize('/path/to/newrelic.ini')

logger = logging.getLogger('my_app')
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

@newrelic.agent.transaction()
def process_order(order_id):
    logger.info(f"Processing order: {order_id}", extra={'order_id': order_id, 'status': 'initiated'})
    # ... application logic ...
    logger.info(f"Order {order_id} processed successfully", extra={'order_id': order_id, 'status': 'completed'})

process_order("ABC-123")
    

This snippet demonstrates enriching logs with context for unified analysis in New Relic. Always use official log forwarders or integrations for production.

New Relic Query Language (NRQL) and Dashboards

NRQL (New Relic Query Language) is a powerful, SQL-like language for querying data in New Relic. DevOps engineers use NRQL to create custom queries, build dynamic dashboards, and extract specific insights. It transforms raw observability data into actionable intelligence. Dashboards provide a customizable interface to visualize NRQL results, offering real-time views of system health. Mastering NRQL enables tailored observability experiences.

Basic NRQL Query Example

To find the average response time for an application over the last hour:

SELECT average(duration) FROM Transaction WHERE appName = 'YourApplicationName' SINCE 1 hour ago
    

To count page views by country in a browser application:

SELECT count(*) FROM PageView FACET countryCode SINCE 1 day ago
    

Alerts, Notifications, and Incident Management

New Relic's alerting capabilities are fundamental for proactive incident management. DevOps engineers configure alert conditions based on various metrics (e.g., CPU, error rates, response times) to be notified of threshold breaches. Alert policies group conditions and define notification channels. Channels integrate with tools like Slack, PagerDuty, and webhooks, ensuring prompt alerts. Effective incident management minimizes downtime and improves mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Action Item: Configuring a Critical Alert

To configure an alert, define a condition (e.g., "APM error rate over 5% for 5 minutes"). Link this condition to an alert policy, then specify notification channels (e.g., a specific Slack channel or PagerDuty service). Ensure alert context provides enough information for quick assessment by on-call engineers.

DevOps Integrations and Automation

New Relic integrates deeply with various DevOps tools and workflows for end-to-end observability. Key integrations include CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI), configuration management (e.g., Ansible, Terraform), and incident management platforms. These streamline operations and enhance automation. For example, a new deployment can automatically create a deployment marker in New Relic, correlating performance changes with releases. New Relic's APIs allow programmatic management of entities and data, vital for robust, observable pipelines.

Conceptual API Call for Deployment Event

To send a deployment event to New Relic via its API after a successful CI/CD pipeline run:

# Example using curl (replace placeholders)
curl -X POST 'https://api.newrelic.com/v2/applications/APP_ID/deployments.json' \
     -H 'Api-Key: YOUR_ADMIN_API_KEY' \
     -i \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d \
'{
  "deployment": {
    "revision": "COMMIT_SHA",
    "changelog": "New feature X, bug fix Y",
    "description": "Deployment from CI/CD pipeline",
    "user": "ci_cd_system"
  }
}'
    

This creates a visual marker in APM graphs, helping identify performance regressions tied to specific deployments. API automation is a cornerstone of effective DevOps practices.

Troubleshooting and Best Practices in New Relic

Effective troubleshooting with New Relic requires a systematic approach. Start with high-level dashboards, then drill down into services, transactions, and logs for root cause analysis. Distributed tracing aids in complex microservices. Understanding common performance patterns and error types is crucial. Best practices include maintaining clean dashboards, setting up meaningful alerts, and regularly reviewing data retention. Optimize agent configurations to balance data richness and resource consumption. Continuous learning about New Relic ensures effective platform utilization.

Key Best Practices for DevOps Engineers

• Dashboard Hygiene: Keep dashboards relevant, clear, and up-to-date for quick insights.
• Contextual Alerts: Ensure alerts provide enough context for immediate action, reducing alert fatigue.
• Tagging and Metadata: Use consistent tagging for applications and infrastructure for better filtering and analysis.
• Performance Baselines: Establish baselines for key metrics to quickly spot anomalies.
• Regular Reviews: Periodically review your New Relic setup (agents, alerts, dashboards) to adapt to evolving systems.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: What is the main difference between New Relic APM and Infrastructure?

A: APM focuses on application code performance and transaction tracing. Infrastructure monitors underlying hosts, containers, and cloud resources like CPU and memory.

Q: How does New Relic aid in a DevOps culture?

A: It provides shared visibility across dev and ops, enabling faster feedback loops, proactive issue detection, and data-driven decisions, improving collaboration and reliability.

Q: Can New Relic monitor serverless functions?

A: Yes, it offers specialized instrumentation for serverless functions (e.g., AWS Lambda), providing visibility into invocations, errors, and cold starts.

Q: What is NRQL and why is it important for DevOps?

A: NRQL (New Relic Query Language) is a powerful, SQL-like language for querying data. It's crucial for creating custom dashboards, analyzing trends, and building targeted alerts.

Q: How do deployment markers help in troubleshooting?

A: Deployment markers visually indicate new application versions. This helps correlate performance degradation or error spikes with recent code changes, speeding up root cause analysis.

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Further Reading

• New Relic Documentation: The official source for all New Relic features, installation guides, and best practices.
• New Relic Blog: Insights, updates, and deep dives into observability trends and product capabilities.
• DevOps Collective: A community-driven resource for DevOps principles, practices, and tools (placeholder link).

Conclusion

This comprehensive study guide has equipped you with fundamental knowledge and practical insights into New Relic, specifically tailored for DevOps engineers. By understanding core concepts like APM, Infrastructure monitoring, NRQL, and effective alerting, you are now better prepared to tackle complex interview questions and demonstrate your expertise. New Relic remains a cornerstone of modern observability, enabling teams to build, deploy, and operate high-performing, reliable systems.

Continuously expanding your knowledge in observability tools like New Relic is key to a successful DevOps career. Explore our other related articles or subscribe to our newsletter for more expert guides and updates!

1. What is New Relic?

New Relic is a full-stack observability platform offering APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, synthetics, browser monitoring, and distributed tracing. It helps DevOps teams detect performance issues, optimize applications, and ensure reliability across cloud environments.

2. What is New Relic APM?

New Relic APM monitors application performance in real time by tracking response time, throughput, errors, transactions, database queries, and external calls. It provides deep visibility into code-level bottlenecks, enabling faster debugging and performance optimization.

3. What is New Relic Infrastructure?

New Relic Infrastructure monitors servers, containers, cloud services, and operating systems. It provides insights into CPU, memory, disk, network, processes, and configuration changes, helping teams troubleshoot resource issues and maintain infrastructure health.

4. What is distributed tracing in New Relic?

Distributed tracing visualizes the path of requests across microservices, showing latency, bottlenecks, and errors. New Relic helps teams understand service dependencies, trace slow operations, and quickly identify issues in complex cloud-native architectures.

5. What are New Relic agents?

New Relic agents are software components installed on applications or hosts to collect runtime telemetry. Agents exist for Java, Python, .NET, Node.js, Go, PHP, Ruby, and more. They capture metrics, transactions, logs, traces, and events for analysis.

6. What is New Relic NRQL?

NRQL (New Relic Query Language) is a SQL-like language used to query events, metrics, logs, and traces. It powers dashboards, alerts, and custom visualizations. NRQL supports filters, aggregations, time-series queries, and advanced analytics for observability.

7. What is New Relic One?

New Relic One is the unified observability platform combining APM, infrastructure, logs, synthetics, browser, mobile, and dashboards into a single interface. It provides full-stack visibility and cross-application insights for modern DevOps workflows.

8. What is New Relic Alerts?

New Relic Alerts enables creation of alert policies for metrics, logs, errors, SLOs, and NRQL queries. It supports anomaly detection, multi-channel notifications, and advanced alert conditions, helping teams respond quickly to system and application issues.

9. What is New Relic Synthetics?

New Relic Synthetics performs automated tests such as pings, browser scripts, and API checks to simulate user interactions. It helps detect uptime issues, performance degradation, and endpoint failures before they impact real users in production environments.

10. What is New Relic Logs?

New Relic Logs centralizes application, server, and container logs for search, filtering, correlation, and troubleshooting. It integrates with APM and infrastructure metrics, allowing teams to quickly identify root causes using combined logs and traces.

11. What is New Relic Browser Monitoring?

Browser Monitoring tracks front-end performance metrics such as page load time, JavaScript errors, Core Web Vitals, and user interactions. It helps teams optimize client-side performance and understand how real users experience the application.

12. What is New Relic Mobile Monitoring?

Mobile Monitoring provides performance insights for Android and iOS apps, tracking crashes, latency, network calls, session performance, and user behavior. It helps identify issues across mobile devices and optimize user experience across mobile platforms.

13. What are Golden Signals in New Relic?

Golden Signals include latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. New Relic visualizes these key indicators to help teams quickly assess application health, detect failures, and troubleshoot bottlenecks in distributed systems and microservice architectures.

14. What is an alert policy in New Relic?

An alert policy groups alert conditions that monitor key metrics such as error rates, response times, CPU usage, or NRQL results. Policies define thresholds, evaluation windows, notification channels, and escalation settings for automated incident responses.

15. What is New Relic Dashboards?

Dashboards visualize metrics, logs, synthetics, traces, and NRQL queries in customizable charts. They help DevOps teams monitor real-time system behavior and create unified views of application, infrastructure, and business performance across environments.

16. What is New Relic Error Analytics?

Error Analytics provides detailed insights into application errors, grouping them by type, frequency, transactions, and user impact. It helps teams identify recurring issues, analyze stack traces, and quickly resolve defects affecting application stability.

17. What is New Relic Insights?

New Relic Insights is a real-time analytics engine that uses NRQL to query events, logs, and metrics. It powers dashboards, alerts, and reports, enabling teams to analyze performance trends, business transactions, and application behavior instantly.

18. What is a transaction trace?

A transaction trace captures detailed execution data for slow or error-producing transactions. It shows timings, database calls, external calls, and code-level segments, helping developers identify performance bottlenecks within application logic.

19. What are service maps in New Relic?

Service maps visualize relationships between microservices, showing dependencies, throughput, latency, and error rates. They help DevOps teams understand service interactions and identify bottlenecks or failures across distributed architectures.

20. What is alert severity in New Relic?

Alert severity defines the impact level of an alert, typically categorized as critical or warning. Critical alerts require immediate action, while warnings highlight early anomalies. Severity helps teams prioritize incident response workflows efficiently.

21. What is New Relic Telemetry Data Platform?

The Telemetry Data Platform collects and stores metrics, logs, traces, and events from any source using open APIs. It acts as a centralized observability datastore, enabling real-time querying with NRQL and seamless integration across monitoring tools.

22. What is New Relic OpenTelemetry support?

New Relic supports OpenTelemetry for vendor-neutral instrumentation of applications. It collects OTel metrics, logs, and traces, enabling teams to standardize observability data and integrate New Relic with existing open-source monitoring ecosystems.

23. How does New Relic integrate with Kubernetes?

New Relic monitors Kubernetes clusters by collecting pod, node, container, and workload metrics. It visualizes cluster health, resource usage, events, and logs, enabling DevOps teams to troubleshoot scaling issues and optimize containerized workloads.

24. What is a baseline alert?

Baseline alerts automatically detect anomalies by learning historical trends and setting dynamic thresholds. Instead of static limits, baseline alerts trigger when performance deviates significantly from normal patterns, improving alert accuracy.

25. What is New Relic Apdex?

Apdex (Application Performance Index) measures user satisfaction based on response time thresholds. It classifies requests as satisfied, tolerating, or frustrated and calculates a score, helping teams gauge application performance quality for end users.

26. What are key transactions in New Relic?

Key transactions are business-critical operations monitored separately for better visibility. They highlight important endpoints such as checkout, login, or payment services, enabling DevOps teams to track performance and detect issues early.

27. What is New Relic SLO management?

New Relic supports setting Service Level Objectives for uptime, latency, and error rates. It tracks compliance, calculates burn rate, and visualizes SLO performance trends, helping teams ensure reliability commitments are consistently met.

28. What is span monitoring?

Span monitoring captures individual operations within a distributed trace, showing granular timing and contextual metadata. It helps identify which segments of a request contribute to latency, enabling precise optimization of microservices workflows.

29. What is New Relic Alerts Muting Rules?

Muting Rules temporarily silence alerts for specific services, hosts, or environments during deployments, maintenance, or planned downtime. They prevent alert fatigue by ensuring teams only receive actionable notifications when necessary.

30. What is New Relic Workloads?

Workloads group related services, applications, infrastructure, and Kubernetes components into a single operational view. They help teams monitor business functions rather than individual components, improving observability across complex systems.

31. What are deployment markers?

Deployment markers indicate when a new deployment occurs, tagging charts and timelines with version changes. They help teams correlate performance issues or improvements with specific deployments and quickly identify problematic releases.

32. What is New Relic Serverless Monitoring?

Serverless Monitoring tracks AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions performance. It measures cold starts, execution time, errors, throughput, and dependencies, giving deep visibility into serverless workloads and event-driven architectures.

33. What is New Relic Integration Hub?

Integration Hub provides hundreds of prebuilt integrations for cloud providers, databases, messaging systems, web servers, and SaaS platforms. It allows seamless ingestion of telemetry data, enriching observability across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

34. What is browser page load breakdown?

Browser page load breakdown separates load time into DNS lookup, TCP connection, SSL handshake, DOM processing, rendering, and network latency. It helps frontend teams identify slow components impacting user experience across web applications.

35. What is New Relic Mobile Crash Analysis?

Mobile Crash Analysis captures crash logs, stack traces, device details, OS versions, and user sessions. It helps identify root causes of mobile crashes, enabling teams to fix stability issues and improve performance across Android and iOS apps.

36. What is New Relic Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability Management scans applications, dependencies, and libraries for known security risks. It integrates with code-level instrumentation to detect vulnerabilities early, helping DevOps and security teams mitigate risks proactively.

37. What is metric normalization?

Metric normalization groups similar metrics under standardized names, enabling consistent dashboards and alerts across environments. It helps maintain clean observability data and ensures monitoring accuracy during scaling or infrastructure changes.

38. What is the New Relic Query Builder?

The Query Builder is a UI tool for writing and testing NRQL queries without requiring deep syntax knowledge. It provides autocomplete, visual previews, aggregations, filters, and time-series tools to generate dashboards and alerts efficiently.

39. What is New Relic Alerts Violation?

A violation occurs when a metric or NRQL condition exceeds its threshold for a sustained period. Violations trigger alert notifications and provide detailed context such as charts, logs, and traces to help teams investigate incidents quickly.

40. What are event types in New Relic?

Event types represent different categories of telemetry data such as Transaction, Error, Log, Metric, Span, and PageView. They define the structure of data ingested into New Relic and allow NRQL queries to analyze trends, anomalies, and user behavior.

41. What is New Relic Workload Status?

Workload Status provides a consolidated health view of grouped services, indicating error rates, latency, throughput, and resource usage. It helps teams monitor business-critical systems in real time and quickly identify failing components.

42. What is a New Relic Monitor?

A monitor is a synthetic test that checks uptime, performance, or API availability. New Relic supports ping monitors, scripted browsers, API tests, and SSL checks, ensuring continuous validation of application endpoints and user journeys.

43. What is a throughput metric?

Throughput measures the number of requests, transactions, or operations processed per minute. In New Relic, it helps identify traffic patterns, load issues, scaling needs, and performance bottlenecks across applications and microservices.

44. What is a New Relic API Key?

API Keys authenticate requests to the New Relic API for tasks such as data ingestion, dashboard automation, querying, and integrations. Different keys exist for user access, ingest, and administration, ensuring secure platform usage.

45. What is New Relic SLA reporting?

SLA reporting tracks uptime, latency, and reliability against defined thresholds over daily, weekly, or monthly periods. It helps teams validate performance commitments, analyze service degradation, and communicate reliability metrics with stakeholders.

46. What are alert evaluation windows?

Evaluation windows determine how long a metric must violate a condition before triggering an alert. They reduce noise by preventing alerts for brief spikes and ensure only sustained performance issues generate actionable notifications.

47. What is New Relic Event Explorer?

Event Explorer allows users to browse and filter all event types, including logs, transactions, traces, and custom events. It provides powerful search and grouping tools to investigate application anomalies and identify unusual patterns.

48. What is instrumentation in New Relic?

Instrumentation refers to adding monitoring code or agents to applications so New Relic can collect metrics, logs, and traces. It can be automatic through language agents or manual using custom instrumentation APIs for granular insights.

49. What is New Relic Alerts Incident?

An incident is created when one or more violations occur in the same alert policy. It groups related issues to avoid alert flooding, giving teams a single actionable event to resolve. Incidents close automatically when conditions return to normal.

50. What is New Relic’s Full-Stack Observability?

Full-Stack Observability provides end-to-end visibility across applications, infrastructure, logs, traces, browsers, mobile apps, and Kubernetes. It unifies telemetry into one platform, helping DevOps teams troubleshoot faster and improve system reliability.