This guest blog post was contributed by Bill Hodak, director of product marketing at New Relic, an application performance management vendor and Joyent partner.

As New Relic continues to grow its functionality and product suite, we work hard to expose new features to our customers in a consistent and intuitive manner. Today we are pleased to announce Key Transactions and a redesigned, simplified user experience.

New Relic and Joyent have partnered to make New Relic Standard available to all Joyent customers free of charge. If you’re not yet a customer, sign up today! All accounts start with 14 days of Pro, for free.

Introducing Key Transactions: Bringing Enterprise Class Features to Every Developer

Since New Relic’s start, we’ve worked tirelessly to capture the power of traditional APM, improve upon it and make it available to the masses as an easy-to-use SaaS offering. And although we’ve helped more than 25,000+ customers monitor and optimize their websites, we’re far from being done! That’s why we’re introducing our Key Transactions feature.

Traditional APM solutions typically look at the application as a whole. They report on the aggregate performance and errors of all transactions. But not all transactions are created equal; sometimes the most important functions of your website are the ones that aren’t heavily trafficked. For this reason, we created Key Transactions — a new way to identify those important business transactions you want to monitor and manage regardless of the overall application throughput.

With just a couple of clicks, you can track the most important transactions in your business and make sure they are performing well compared to their historical norm. We’ve also brought over our super useful SLA reports and App Map, which allows you to report on and visualize transaction specific data.

Key Transactions are available to New Relic Pro subscribers. If you’re a New Relic Lite or Standard customer and want to try it out, just contact our sales team and we’d be happy to let you test drive it for a while.

Learn more about Key Transactions here or check out this video.

The Newest New Relic: Learn about Our New UI

One of our biggest challenges is how to add functionality to New Relic without increasing complexity. When considering new design ideas, we strike a careful balance between “pushing the envelope” and maintaining familiarity and consistency for our customers. We also strive to help our newest customers introduce themselves to the product, while not getting in the way of experienced users who use New Relic every day.

Many of the changes we made are based on direct feedback from customers and usability testing we did over the last few months. We also made some choices to accommodate features yet to come!

Navigation:

We’ve moved the top level products menu to a left vertical navigation, making it easy to switch between areas, such as Applications, Servers, Key Transactions, and Custom Dashboards throughout the entire New Relic application. And once you’ve navigated within a product area, such as when you have selected a specific application under Applications, a double row horizontal navigation menu at the top of the screen presents all of the monitoring tasks or views for your app.

Browser Monitoring:

We’ve combined the elements of browser and app monitoring onto one overview screen. Having both browser and app server data on the same screen provides a single place for you to get a high level end-to-end picture of your application health.

Web Transactions, Transaction Traces and Slow SQL:

Transaction Traces (both browser and application) are now integrated in the Web Transactions screen, while Slow SQL is now featured in the Database screen.

Previously when exploring a Transaction Trace, users had to bounce between the Web Transactions screen and the actual transaction trace in the Diagnostics section to understand how the Transaction Trace related to the aggregate app performance. Now you’ll find a table of your recent Transaction Traces on the Web Transactions screen, giving you immediate access to Transaction Traces of a specific web transaction.

We’ve used this same interaction for Slow SQL from the Database screen. There is an app level list of Slow SQL statements on the default Database screen and after you’ve selected a SQL statement from the list on the left you have access to related Slow SQL statements for that specific query.

Learn more about our new UI by checking out this blog post. Or join us at one of our upcoming webinars where we will review all of the changes in our user interface.