Top 50 New Relic Interview Question and Answers

Top 50 New Relic Interview Question and Answers

New Relic is a powerful observability platform widely used for application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, and error tracking. Whether you’re a developer, DevOps engineer, or site reliability engineer (SRE), proficiency in New Relic can be a critical asset in your career. This guide provides the top 50 New Relic interview questions and answers to help you prepare effectively.

1. What is New Relic?

Answer: New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that provides monitoring solutions for applications, infrastructure, and distributed systems. It helps organizations track performance metrics, diagnose issues, and optimize systems.

2. What are the main components of New Relic?

Answer: The main components include:

  • APM (Application Performance Monitoring): Monitors application performance.

  • Infrastructure Monitoring: Tracks server and cloud environment performance.

  • Browser Monitoring: Measures end-user experiences.

  • Synthetics: Simulates user interactions for testing.

  • Insights: Provides custom data analytics.

3. What is an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool?

Answer: APM tools help monitor the performance and availability of software applications, providing insights into code-level performance, error rates, and transaction traces.

4. What are transactions in New Relic?

Answer: Transactions are units of work performed within an application. New Relic tracks transactions to measure their response times, throughput, and errors.

5. How does New Relic monitor applications?

Answer: New Relic uses agents installed in applications to collect data about performance, errors, and infrastructure metrics. This data is sent to the New Relic platform for analysis.

6. What programming languages does New Relic support?

Answer: New Relic supports languages like Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, and Go.

7. How do you integrate New Relic with a Node.js application?

Answer: To integrate:

  1. Install the New Relic Node.js agent using npm install newrelic.

  2. Configure the newrelic.js file with your license key and application name.

  3. Start the application to begin monitoring.

8. What is a New Relic agent?

Answer: A New Relic agent is a piece of software installed on a host or application to collect monitoring data, such as performance metrics and transaction traces.

9. Explain the concept of distributed tracing in New Relic.

Answer: Distributed tracing tracks requests as they flow through a distributed system, helping identify bottlenecks and latency across microservices.

10. What is the purpose of custom dashboards in New Relic?

Answer: Custom dashboards allow users to visualize specific metrics and KPIs relevant to their application or infrastructure.

11. How do you configure alert policies in New Relic?

Answer:

  1. Navigate to the Alerts & AI section.

  2. Create a new policy and add conditions for the metrics you want to monitor.

  3. Assign notification channels like email, Slack, or PagerDuty.

12. What is NRQL, and why is it used?

Answer: NRQL (New Relic Query Language) is a SQL-like query language used to extract insights and data from the New Relic database. It’s used for creating custom dashboards and alerts.

13. What are the benefits of using New Relic’s synthetic monitoring?

Answer: Synthetic monitoring simulates user interactions, helping identify issues before real users encounter them. Benefits include proactive troubleshooting and performance optimization.

14. What is an SLA report in New Relic?

Answer: An SLA (Service Level Agreement) report provides insights into application uptime and performance metrics, ensuring adherence to agreed service levels.

15. How can you monitor Kubernetes with New Relic?

Answer: Install the New Relic Kubernetes integration using Helm or the New Relic CLI. This integration collects data on cluster performance, pod metrics, and node health.

Scenario-Based Questions

16. How would you troubleshoot high response times using New Relic?

Answer:

  1. Analyze APM transaction traces.

  2. Identify slow database queries or external calls.

  3. Optimize identified bottlenecks.

17. Describe a use case for using New Relic with AWS.

Answer: Monitor AWS services such as EC2, RDS, and Lambda to ensure optimal resource utilization and application performance.

18. How would you implement custom instrumentation in New Relic?

Answer: Use the agent’s APIs to define custom transactions or metrics, ensuring critical business operations are tracked.

19. What are Apdex scores in New Relic?

Answer: Apdex (Application Performance Index) scores measure user satisfaction based on response times. A higher score indicates better user experience.

20. What is the difference between errors and violations in New Relic?

Answer:

  • Errors: Issues in application code or infrastructure.

  • Violations: Breaches of alert thresholds set in policies.

21. How does New Relic handle distributed systems monitoring?

Answer: New Relic uses distributed tracing and integrations with various services to provide a unified view of distributed systems, enabling users to monitor dependencies and performance across services.

22. What is New Relic One?

Answer: New Relic One is the reimagined observability platform that integrates all New Relic tools and services into a single interface, providing a holistic view of an organization’s ecosystem.

23. How do you create a custom NRQL alert condition?

Answer:

  1. Navigate to Alerts & AI and create a new condition.

  2. Select “NRQL” as the condition type.

  3. Write your NRQL query to define the alert criteria.

  4. Set thresholds and notifications.

24. Explain New Relic’s integration with CI/CD pipelines.

Answer: New Relic can be integrated with CI/CD pipelines to monitor deployment impact, track performance regressions, and ensure new changes meet performance standards.

25. What is the New Relic Explorer?

Answer: The New Relic Explorer is a feature that provides a visual representation of an organization’s monitored entities, making it easier to identify issues and their impacts.

26. What are golden signals, and how does New Relic help track them?

Answer: Golden signals include latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. New Relic provides tools like APM, dashboards, and alerting to monitor these signals effectively.

27. How can you monitor logs in New Relic?

Answer: Enable the Logs feature, configure log forwarding (e.g., Fluentd, Logstash), and visualize logs alongside other telemetry data.

28. What is the role of the New Relic agent’s configuration file?

Answer: The configuration file defines parameters like the application name, license key, and logging levels, ensuring proper communication with New Relic.

29. What is the “Throughput” metric in New Relic?

Answer: Throughput measures the number of transactions processed by an application per minute, indicating system activity levels.

30. How does New Relic help in capacity planning?

Answer: By tracking resource utilization trends and analyzing system performance data, New Relic assists in forecasting future capacity needs and optimizing infrastructure.

31. What is the purpose of New Relic’s Distributed Tracing feature?

Answer: Distributed Tracing helps track requests as they move through a distributed system, allowing users to pinpoint delays or errors in specific services and identify bottlenecks.

32. How can you monitor serverless applications with New Relic?

Answer: Use New Relic’s integration for AWS Lambda to monitor serverless applications. This includes installing the New Relic Lambda extension and configuring the environment to send telemetry data.

33. What is New Relic Browser Monitoring?

Answer: Browser Monitoring tracks the performance of web applications from the end user’s perspective, measuring metrics like page load times, AJAX requests, and JavaScript errors.

34. Explain New Relic Synthetic Monitoring’s capabilities.

Answer: Synthetic Monitoring simulates user interactions to test the availability and performance of applications. It includes capabilities such as API testing, browser testing, and uptime checks.

35. What are New Relic Insights?

Answer: Insights is New Relic’s analytics tool that uses NRQL to query and visualize data for creating custom reports and dashboards.

36. How do you set up alert notifications in New Relic?

Answer:

  1. Go to the Alerts & AI section.
  2. Create a notification channel (e.g., email, Slack, PagerDuty).
  3. Assign the notification channel to alert policies for real-time notifications.

37. What is the New Relic Terraform Provider?

Answer: The New Relic Terraform Provider enables users to manage New Relic resources, such as dashboards and alerts, using infrastructure-as-code principles.

38. How does New Relic support microservices monitoring?

Answer: New Relic provides features like Distributed Tracing, service maps, and custom metrics to monitor the performance and health of microservices.

39. What is the use of New Relic APIs?

Answer: New Relic APIs allow programmatic access to retrieve data, manage resources, and automate tasks like setting up dashboards and alerts.

40. What are the main differences between APM and Infrastructure Monitoring in New Relic?

Answer:

  • APM: Focuses on application-level metrics like response time, throughput, and error rates.
  • Infrastructure Monitoring: Tracks metrics like CPU, memory usage, and disk I/O at the host level.

41. How do you manage multiple accounts in New Relic?

Answer: Use New Relic’s organization management features to link multiple accounts and manage users, billing, and permissions across accounts from a single interface.

42. What are key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring applications with New Relic?

Answer: Common KPIs include Apdex scores, response times, throughput, error rates, and infrastructure resource usage.

43. How can you secure data in New Relic?

Answer: Use features like data encryption, role-based access control (RBAC), and audit logs to secure data in New Relic.

44. What is New Relic’s Infrastructure agent?

Answer: The Infrastructure agent collects performance data from servers and hosts, including metrics like CPU, memory, and disk usage.

45. How does New Relic handle multi-cloud environments?

Answer: New Relic integrates with major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and provides unified monitoring across services, regions, and accounts.

46. Explain how New Relic helps with root cause analysis.

Answer: New Relic provides tools like Distributed Tracing, error analytics, and transaction details to quickly identify and address the root cause of performance issues.

47. What is New Relic’s Data Retention Policy?

Answer: New Relic retains high-resolution data for a short period (e.g., 8 days) and aggregates it for longer-term storage based on the subscription tier.

48. How do you monitor databases with New Relic?

Answer: Use APM to track database performance, including slow queries, throughput, and time spent on database operations.

49. What are the common challenges of using New Relic, and how do you address them?

Answer:

  • Challenge: High data ingestion costs. Solution: Optimize data collection by filtering unnecessary metrics.
  • Challenge: Alert fatigue. Solution: Fine-tune alert policies and thresholds.

50. How does New Relic support team collaboration?

Answer: New Relic allows teams to share dashboards, assign alert responsibilities, and use collaboration tools like Slack for real-time notifications and discussions.


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