NewRelic: setting apdex threshold value differently for each page

Question

Our application server exposes few API end-points, making API calls to external services (CRM etc.) Let's consider 2 REST API end-points

GET /user-details

This should be very fast (~50ms) because it only needs to fetch few details from db and return data

POST /sync-user-with-crm

This makes external API call to another service which is slow, and outside our control so it has expected response time of 1-2s.

We have an equal distribution of the above calls. We would like to get an alert with low apdex if the first call slows down to 100ms or more. As per available settings in NewRelic, if we set expected time for API to be 50ms, apdex would be low because of 2nd API. if we set to 2s, it won't alert us when first call slows down. Is there a way to set alerts correctly for the above usecase?

Answer 1

New Relic has a concept of "key transactions", where you can define, in your case, both of your endpoints as such. This would allow you to configure an Apdex threshold per endpoint: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/apm/transactions/key-transactions/introduction-key-transactions/

The alternative is to just use NRQL Alerts to target latency for each endpoint. Basically 2 alert conditions querying the Transaction eventType, filtered by each unique endpoint:

SELECT max(duration) FROM Transaction where name = <endpoint_name>