The Top 10 New Relic Interview Questions and Answers

To get hired at New Relic, you have to show that you are good at monitoring, analytics, and troubleshooting during the interview process. It goes over some of the most common New Relic interview questions and gives you advice on how to answer them in a way that gets you the job.

1. What is New Relic and how does it work?

This fundamental question gauges your overall understanding of the New Relic platform, The interviewer wants to know that you grasp the core capabilities and value proposition of this APM tool

In your response, cover details like:

• New Relic is an application performance monitoring tool
• It provides real-time analytics and visibility into app performance
• Monitors key metrics like response time, throughput, errors
• Aggregates telemetry data through agents installed on apps/servers
• Enables alerting, troubleshooting and root cause analysis
• Offers different products for monitoring infra, apps, browsers etc.

Sample Answer New Relic is an industry-leading application performance monitoring and analytics tool It works by installing lightweight agents on servers and apps to collect granular telemetry data like response times, request throughput and error rates This data feeds into the New Relic dashboard to provide real-time visibility into the health and performance of applications. The platform leverages aggregated data to enable alerting, troubleshooting performance issues and identifying root causes. New Relic offers robust APM, infrastructure monitoring and browser monitoring capabilities through its suite of products.

2. What are some key features of New Relic APM?

Since New Relic APM is a core product, you can expect questions that test how well you know its main features. Highlight features like:

• Application mapping and visualization
• Trace details like throughput, response time, CPU usage
• Performance dashboards and custom reporting
• Real user monitoring and session tracing
• Alerts and threshold-based monitoring
• Root cause analysis to pinpoint issues
• Forecasting utilization and demand

Sample Answer: Some of the key features that make New Relic APM so powerful include: detailed application mapping and visualizations, granular tracing of transactions with performance metrics like response time and CPU utilization, custom dashboards and reporting, alerts and thresholds, root cause analysis, real user monitoring and forecasting capabilities. New Relic provides a comprehensive view into the health and usage patterns of critical applications to optimize performance.

3. How does New Relic collect and transmit data?

Since data collection is foundational to how New Relic functions, expect questions on this topic Highlight that

• Agents installed on hosts/apps gather system-level metrics
• Agents communicate with New Relic servers to transmit data
• Data is sent securely every 60 seconds via HTTPS
• New Relic servers aggregate and process data in real-time
• Data is accessed via the New Relic dashboard and tools

Sample Answer: New Relic utilizes intelligent agents that are installed on the hosts and applications you want to monitor. These lightweight agents collect granular performance data by tapping into the application runtimes, databases, operating systems and other systems. The agents securely transmit this real-time system telemetry to the New Relic servers every 60 seconds over HTTPS. The servers process and aggregate the data in real-time to make it available on the New Relic dashboard for analysis and alerting.

4. Explain how New Relic troubleshooting works

Since troubleshooting is a major use case, be ready to discuss New Relic’s troubleshooting workflows. Cover how users can:

• Identify issues via performance dashboards
• Leverage alert notifications for critical events
• Pinpoint problems through application mapping
• Isolate issues using traces and transaction views
• Perform root cause analysis across components
• Track issues to specific lines of code

Sample Answer: New Relic enables swift troubleshooting through its dashboard monitoring, alerts and detailed transaction tracing. For example, if response time degrades, New Relic would send an automatic alert notification. Users could then investigate further on the performance dashboards to pinpoint the specific transactions and code segments driving the slowdown based on indexed telemetry data. From there, they can narrow in on potential issues through the application map, and use additional tools like traces and logs to isolate root causes down to the line of code at fault.

5. What types of data and metrics does New Relic monitor?

Understand the various metrics captured by New Relic. Examples include:

• Application performance – response time, throughput, errors
• Infrastructure – CPU, memory, disk, network usage
• Browser – page load times, AJAX requests, errors
• Mobile – crashes, network traffic, response times
• Business metrics – revenue, orders, active users

Sample Answer: New Relic monitors a very wide array of metrics across applications, infrastructure, mobile apps and browsers. Key examples include application response times, throughput and error rates, server resource utilization like CPU, memory and disk usage, browser page load performance and AJAX requests, mobile crash rates and network traffic, and even business metrics like revenue and active users. The extensive telemetry enables deep performance monitoring and answers key questions.

6. How does New Relic integrate with other tools?

Discuss New Relic’s integration capabilities:

• 150+ plugin integrations with DevOps tools
• REST APIs and webhooks to connect with other systems
• Export telemetry data to BI tools like Tableau for custom reporting
• Alert notifications can trigger actions in collaboration tools
• Single sign-on integration with identity providers

Sample Answer: A major benefit of New Relic is its vast integration capabilities with hundreds of complementary DevOps tools through both ready-made plugins and APIs. For example, New Relic data can feed into collaboration tools like Slack and data analytics tools like Tableau. Alerts can automatically trigger actions and workflows in incident management systems. New Relic also enables robust single sign-on integration with identity providers. These seamless integrations enhance the value derived from New Relic monitoring.

7. What are some typical use cases for New Relic?

Highlight typical New Relic uses like:

• Monitoring cloud-based and on-prem application performance
• Troubleshooting and root cause analysis for apps and infrastructure
• Application tracing to identify optimization opportunities
• Alerting to detect incidents and outages
• Reporting to understand usage trends and capacity planning
• Monitoring user experience for web and mobile apps

Sample Answer: Common use cases for New Relic include monitoring cloud and on-prem application performance to spot issues and ensure uptime, conducting granular tracing to optimize application architecture and code, driving alerts for critical events, generating reports to analyze trends for capacity planning, and monitoring end-user experiences for web and mobile applications. New Relic is a versatile tool for application performance monitoring, troubleshooting, alerting and reporting.

8. How would you troubleshoot an application performance problem with New Relic?

Demonstrate your approach to troubleshooting with New Relic. Cover key steps like:

• Identify issue through dashboard monitoring and alerts
• Inspect application map to spot anomalous nodes
• Drill into slow traces and transactions
• Compare metrics during failure to baseline
• Leverage logs for application context
• Isolate root cause and problematic code

Sample Answer: If an application performance issue was reported, my first step would be checking the New Relic dashboards and alerts for any events or degradations to narrow down when it began. I would inspect the application map to spot any components reporting anomalies. From there, I would drill into the slow traces and transactions during the failure period and compare them to baseline metrics to isolate specific sluggish code paths. The detailed telemetry and logs would help me correlate issues to specific lines of code and database queries to pinpoint the root cause. This process allows rapid troubleshooting.

9. How does New Relic APM relate to ELK Stack?

Compare and contrast these competing monitoring tools:

• New Relic specializes in application performance data
• ELK focuses on broader log analytics use cases
• New Relic provides turnkey SaaS monitoring
• ELK requires custom configuration via Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana
• New Relic has troubleshooting and alerting built-in
• ELK lets users build custom alerts and visualizations

Sample Answer: While both are monitoring toolsets, New Relic APM and the ELK Stack serve different primary purposes. New Relic specializes in turnkey application performance monitoring, tracing, troubleshooting and alerting. In contrast, the ELK Stack is a more generalized log analytics solution requiring more custom configuration that can analyze any log data. New Relic emphasizes out-of-the-box APM, while ELK lets you build custom visualizations and alerts tailored to your infrastructure and use cases.

10. How would you configure New Relic APM for an application?

Show your understanding of APM deployment steps:

• Install New Relic agents in the runtime environments
• Configure agents with app metadata like name, language
• Enable desired monitoring capabilities like tracing
• Tag agents with attributes for filtering
• Validate telemetry data is being captured
• Instrument target applications via agent APIs as needed

Sample Answer: Configuring New Relic APM starts with installation of the New Relic agents in the application hosting environments and servers. The agents are configured with metadata like the application name, language, environment. Monitoring capabilities like transaction tracing are enabled via settings. Relevant tags are applied to agents for segmentation. Once deployed, I validate