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 (utilising 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 anonymised to the centralised 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.
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 realise 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:
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.
Note
New Relic Infrastructure - this product is not compatible with Acquia Cloud at this time.