---
title: "New Relic | Skills We Assign For | Azendo"
description: "New Relic for application performance — finding the real bottleneck, and the Azendo roles assigned for performance work."
url: "https://azendo.co/skills/new-relic/"
---

[Skills](https://azendo.co/skills/) Observability 

# New Relic.

New Relic is an application performance monitoring platform that instruments code to show transaction traces, database timing, error rates and user-facing performance. Its focus is the application layer rather than the infrastructure beneath it.

## Where New Relic fits on a long engagement.

APM answers the question infrastructure monitoring cannot: which part of this request is slow. A transaction trace showing that eighty per cent of a response is one unindexed query ends an argument that could otherwise run for a week.

It is most valuable before a problem is urgent. Instrumentation added during an incident tells you about the incident; instrumentation that has been running for months tells you what changed, which is the question that actually matters.

## What an assigned team does with New Relic.

Application monitoring earns its keep between incidents rather than during them. Its real output is knowing what normal looks like, and that baseline only exists if the instrumentation has been running and watched for months before it is needed.

Performance work sits across two disciplines: the load testing that provokes the problem and the platform work that fixes it. The testing half is assigned under [outsource QA testing](https://azendo.co/services/qa-engineering-and-test-automation/), usually on the same agreement as the platform half.

## What we use New Relic for.

* Finding the real bottleneck Transaction traces identifying where time is spent, rather than optimising the part someone assumed was slow.
* Load testing against production reality Test results interpreted against how the application behaves with real traffic and real data volume.
* Watching a release Error rate and latency compared before and after a deploy, so a regression is caught in minutes.

## How New Relic capacity is assigned.

Performance work is assigned either under QA outsourcing where it sits with load testing, or with reliability capacity where it sits with the platform. The reasoning behind delivering this from Thailand is set out in [why we deliver from Thailand](https://azendo.co/why-thailand/).

## Roles we assign New Relic for

* [Site Reliability Engineer Cloud and DevOps](https://azendo.co/services/cloud-and-devops/site-reliability-engineer/)
* [Performance Test Engineer QA and test automation](https://azendo.co/services/qa-engineering-and-test-automation/performance-test-engineer/)

## Service lines it sits in

* [Cloud and DevOps](https://azendo.co/services/cloud-and-devops/)
* [QA and test automation](https://azendo.co/services/qa-engineering-and-test-automation/)

Capacity is agreed as a committed monthly capacity across a discipline, not per skill.

## Related in observability

* [SLO and error budget design — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/slo-and-error-budget-design/)
* [Prometheus — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/prometheus/)
* [OpenTelemetry — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/opentelemetry/)
* [CloudWatch — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/cloudwatch/)
* [PagerDuty — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/pagerduty/)
* [Observability — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/observability/)
* [Sentry — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/sentry/)
* [Logging — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/logging/)

## Tell us what your roadmap needs New Relic for.

A service delivery manager replies with the disciplines we would assign, the monthly capacity and what the first month looks like.

[All skills we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/)