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Newrelic NextJS Integration For Monitoring App Issues & Errors

Struggling with performance issues in your NextJS app on Vercel? Monitoring Vercel logs can be challenging, but Alerty's NextJS logging solution simplifies the process. Integrating Newrelic with NextJS allows you to effectively monitor your app and address issues before they escalate. 

Ready to enhance your monitoring with NextJS logging? Make your app performance management easier.

Table of Contents

What Is Newrelic?

Web Application - Newrelic NextJS

Newrelic is a web-based software that acts as a full-stack monitoring tool for developers. It allows you to monitor various components of your web application on a single platform, tracking and providing real-time details on performance. 

One of its most prominent features is application performance monitoring (APM), allowing developers to analyze performance data to identify issues causing problems. 

New Relic Integration and Language Support

  • Supports a variety of programming languages
  • Integrates with cloud services like Microsoft Azure
  • Integrates with Amazon Web Services
  • Provides a comprehensive monitoring experience

How Does New Relic Work?

Person Using Computer - Newrelic NextJS

Newrelic utilizes four main types of data to monitor web applications, abbreviated as MELT:

Metrics

Numeric app performance measurements include load time, CPU usage, and memory consumption.

Events

Description of activities within the application, consisting of multiple lines of log data.

Logs

Detailed records of events occurring within the application, each labeled with a timestamp.

Traces

Sequential events that provide chronological information on how the app operates. To retrieve this data, Newrelic uses an agent, a piece of code installed within your application or virtual private server that gathers performance data by instrumenting your app at the code level. 

Types of Monitoring Agents

  • Application performance monitoring agents
  • Infrastructure performance monitoring agents
  • Browser performance monitoring agents

The data collected by the agent is then displayed on a dashboard where users can identify and resolve any performance issues that may arise.

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Key Features and Benefits of Using Newrelic With NextJS

Data Analysis - Newrelic NextJS

Real User Monitoring (RUM)

New Relic’s RUM feature provides insights into how users interact with applications in real time. This data helps optimize user experiences and identify areas for improvement. Alerty offers this feature, but it is even better. Alerty uses AI to help you with your setup, simplifying the process and providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors.

Performance Monitoring

New Relic provides continuous monitoring of application and infrastructure performance.

Synthetic Monitoring

With this feature, you can simulate user interactions with applications.

Dynamic Transaction Mapping

It visually represents transaction paths within applications. This aids in understanding dependencies and identifying performance bottlenecks.

Dashboards and Visualizations

The customizable dashboards and visualizations in New Relic allow users to create personalized views of performance metrics, enhancing visibility and simplifying data analysis.

Incident Alerting

New Relic’s incident alerting feature promptly notifies teams about performance anomalies, allowing quick remediation.

Top-Notch Monitoring With Alerty

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups. It offers application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management. It supports technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues. 

Alerty Monitoring Features

  • Monitors databases such as Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS
  • Tracks key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption
  • Provides quick incident management
  • Includes Real User Monitoring (RUM) for optimizing user experience
  • Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's NextJS logging tool today!

New Relic NextJS Integration for Comprehensive App Monitoring

Person Using Computer - Newrelic NextJS

To integrate New Relic with NextJS for comprehensive application monitoring, you need to follow a few steps: 

1. Create a New Relic Account

Sign up for a New Relic account and obtain your license key. 

2. Install New Relic Packages

Run the command `npm install newrelic @newrelic/next` in your Next.js project to install the New Relic Node.js (APM) agent and New Relic middleware for Next.js. This command will add the necessary dependencies to your `package.json` file.

3. Modify npm Scripts

Update your `dev` and `start` npm scripts in the `package.json` file to include Node’s `-r` option to preload the `@newrelic/next` middleware. If you’re using a custom server with Next.js, ensure you add the `-r` option before your program runs.

4. Add APM Agent Configuration

Place the `newrelic.js` APM agent configuration file in the root directory of your project. Don’t forget to add `app_name` and `license_key` values to the file.

5.  View Performance Data

Run your application and go to the New Relic APM page to view your server-side performance data.

6. Inject Browser Agent

To monitor the front end, inject the New Relic browser agent into your application. Update the `_document.tsx` file with the New Relic browser agent script using the `newrelic` npm package.

7. Capture and Send Error Information

Customize the `_error.tsx` page to capture both backend and frontend errors. Use the `noticeError` method to send detailed JavaScript error information New Relic for further analysis.

Enhancing Application Understanding with New Relic Logs in Context

New Relic supports automatic logs in context options, allowing you to share logs across related events and gain additional context to better understand your application. By integrating the Winston logging framework to forward logs to New Relic, you can automatically correlate and contextualize your Next.js application logs. Update your `newrelic.js` config file with specific attributes to facilitate log forwarding.

Comprehensive Application Monitoring with New Relic and Next.js

Ensure that distributed tracing is enabled in the agent configuration for a more seamless log monitoring experience. Following these steps, you can integrate New Relic with NextJS for a more comprehensive approach to application monitoring, covering server-side data, frontend observability, error tracking, and log contextualization.

What Can You Do With This Integration?

Person Doing an Analysis - Newrelic NextJS

Analyzing Logs and Traces with Newrelic NextJS Integration

Understanding how your Next.js app performs and behaves is crucial for ensuring a positive user experience. The Newrelic NextJS integration offers log management and distributed tracing capabilities to help you effectively analyze application logs and trace requests across microservices in your app.

By diving deep into logs and traces, you can gain valuable insights into your application's data flow. This helps you pinpoint issues and optimize performance, enhancing the overall user experience.

Monitoring Performance Metrics With Newrelic NextJS Integration

Performance metrics provide a comprehensive view of how your Next.js app is performing. By setting up the Newrelic JavaScript library in your application, you can monitor key metrics such as:

  • Page load times
  • Network requests
  • JavaScript errors

These metrics are visually represented in the Newrelic dashboard, making it easy to identify performance issues or anomalies within your app. Monitoring performance metrics lets you stay proactive in optimizing your app's performance and ensuring a seamless user experience.

Creating Custom Dashboards With Newrelic NextJS Integration

Custom dashboards are instrumental in gaining deeper insights into the health and performance of your Next.js app. With the Newrelic NextJS integration, you can create custom dashboards tailored to your monitoring needs. 

Key Benefits of Adding Metrics Widgets

  • Visualize trends in server response time, CPU usage, and memory utilization.
  • Set alerts for potential issues
  • Make data-driven decisions to optimize your application

Custom dashboards empower you to monitor your app's performance effectively and take proactive steps to enhance user experience.

Setting Alerts and Notifications With Newrelic NextJS Integration

Setting up alerts and notifications ensures you are immediately notified of any critical issues affecting your Next.js app. By leveraging predefined thresholds or custom conditions, you can configure alerts in Newrelic to receive notifications via email or SMS. 

Proactive Issue Resolution with New Relic Alerts

This proactive approach to monitoring enables you to stay on top of potential issues and swiftly address them to minimize their impact on your users. Setting up alerts and notifications is a key feature of the Newrelic NextJS integration, allowing you to maintain your app's performance and reliability effectively.

Integrating with Third-Party Services with Newrelic NextJS Integration

The Newrelic NextJS integration supports seamless integrations with various third-party services and tools. By centralizing monitoring and analytics within a single platform, you can streamline your monitoring workflows and gain a holistic view of your Next.js app's performance. 

Enhancing Monitoring with New Relic Integrations

  • Integrate with popular services like AWS, Google Cloud, and GitHub
  • Boost monitoring capabilities and performance optimization
  • Ensure a seamless user experience through efficient monitoring

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Best Practices for Using Newrelic With NextJS

Person Using Laptop - Newrelic NextJS

Monitor Performance Metrics

To ensure your Next.js application runs smoothly, monitoring key performance metrics is crucial. With New Relic, you can easily track metrics like:

  • Response times
  • Throughput
  • Error rates

This will allow you to pinpoint any bottlenecks in your application and address them promptly. If you need more in-depth insights into performance, consider adding custom instrumentation to specific functions or routes within your Next.js application.

Use New Relic Browser Monitoring

Enabling New Relic browser monitoring allows you to monitor the performance of your Next.js application from a client-side perspective. This integration lets you gain real-time insights into user experience and track user interactions such as page views and clicks. Understanding how users engage with your application can help you make informed decisions to enhance their experience.

Set Up Alerts and Dashboards

Creating custom dashboards within New Relic can visually represent key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your Next.js application. You can also configure alerts to stay informed about critical metrics such as high error rates or slow response times. By setting up these alerts, you can proactively address issues before they impact your users.

Analyze Error Tracking

To keep your Next.js application stable and error-free, leverage New Relic to track and analyze errors. You can improve application stability by identifying the root causes of issues. Reviewing transaction traces can help you pinpoint slow transactions and determine where optimizations are needed.

Optimize for Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

Given that Next.js relies heavily on server-side rendering, it's essential to monitor the performance of SSR routes to ensure they are optimized for speed. Implementing caching strategies for SSR pages can significantly reduce load times and improve overall performance.

Review and Iterate

Make it a habit to regularly review the data collected by New Relic to identify trends and areas for improvement in your Next.js application. Using insights derived from New Relic, you can take data-driven decisions to enhance your application's performance and reliability continuously.

5 Newrelic Alternatives for Comprehensive NextJS App Monitoring

Data Monitoring - Newrelic NextJS

1. Alerty

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service that offers application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management. 

Comprehensive Support and Monitoring with Alerty

  • Supports technologies including NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js
  • Helps developers identify and fix issues
  • Monitors databases like Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS
  • Tracks key metrics such as CPU usage and memory consumption

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's NextJS logging tool today!

2. Sentry

Sentry is a widely-used APM tool known for its error monitoring and crash reporting capabilities. These capabilities come from collecting and centralizing error data from all your applications to easily see where and what’s causing errors. 

Debugging Tools Provided by Sentry

  • Access stack traces for detailed error context
  • View logs to trace error sources
  • Utilize environment variables for debugging insights

3. Dotcom-Monitor

Dotcom-Monitor monitors multi-step web transactions for functionality, accessibility, and performance worldwide and inside the network. 

Simplify Transaction Monitoring with Custom Scripts

  • Create scripts to monitor transactions such as shopping carts, signups, and portal logins
  • Track key user interactions with ease

You can record the user path during web application navigation and upload it to the portal. Use Dotcom-Monitor's global monitoring network to set up monitoring from multiple locations or use a Private Agent to monitor inside the network. Review the charts and receive alerts instantly on any failures. Understand the problem to reduce your web application's downtime.

It monitors critical paths end-users take, including: 

  • Login forms
  • Website content verification
  • eCommerce applications

With Dotcom-Monitor, you will be able to script end-user interactions easily to ensure the performance and proper functionality of Rich internet applications, including: 

  • HTML5
  • Flash
  • Flex
  • Silverlight
  • Java
  • AJAX
  • Web elements

Boost your web application performance with the Dotcom-Monitor’s critical features like: 

  • Reporting
  • Alerts
  • APIs
  • Web recorders
  • Private agents
  • Filters
  • Schedules
  • Integrations

You can also view the live status of your web application in an integrated and single interface.

4. Grafana

Grafana has become an open-source observability platform. It focused only on visualization of observability data, but it has since invested in building out an observability stack for:

  • Logging (Loki)
  • Tracing (Tempo)
  • Metrics (Mimir)

Grafana is suitable for teams that focus heavily on metrics monitoring and don’t find logs or tracing as important or valuable (or are willing to pair other tools alongside). They may be interested in self-hosting the open-source version.

5. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic excels at positioning itself as a cloud-native Splunk alternative, focusing on log analysis and security workloads. Sumo Logic is suitable for enterprise teams that primarily want a flexible log analysis/SIEM platform and are willing to invest time in having engineers learn bespoke query language.

Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users With Alerty's NextJS Logging Tool

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service tailored for developers and early-stage startups. It provides various monitoring features, such as application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management. This comprehensive tool supports NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, enabling developers to identify and resolve issues efficiently. 

Comprehensive Database and User Monitoring with Alerty

  • Monitors databases including Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS
  • Tracks essential metrics such as CPU usage and memory consumption
  • Features quick incident management
  • Offers Real User Monitoring (RUM) for enhanced user experience optimization

Alerty's Universal Service Monitoring extends to cover dependencies such as the Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel, offering an all-encompassing monitoring solution. 

Alerty provides a cost-effective alternative to other monitoring services by leveraging AI to streamline setup processes. Its user-friendly design ensures quick and easy setup and integrates seamlessly with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams requiring efficient and affordable monitoring. 

Ensure issues never impact your users. Make Alerty’s NextJS logging tool an essential part of your development toolkit. 

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