Automap for troubleshooting entities

The New Relic automap feature displays entity-centric maps to help you troubleshoot incidents that cascade through interconnected services. With automap, you can pinpoint when and where an issue began by viewing the dependencies that affect your services.

To use automap, you need a New Relic account. If you don't already have one, you can sign up here for a free account.

How it works

New Relic automap displays relationships between entities in your architecture. For version 1, the relationships displayed in automap are based on direct calls between services. For example, APM services are represented as vertices (hexagons) and direct calls are represented as edges (lines) on the graph. This shows you how these services depend on one another.

Automap displays only the entities related to the source entity that have experienced a change in health status within three hours after the automap was launched. So, it may not show all entities related to the source entity. To understand entities and relationships, as well as how the entity platform synthesizes both from telemetry data, see entities and relationships.

Open automap

Automap appears on any Related entities pane for supported entity types:

1. In Explorer, insert a filter to find your entity/service (for example, alerts).

2. Click on the entity/service.

3. On the Summary page, go to Related entities in the right pane.

4. Click Map view:

   

The Map view button is only available for the following types of entities:

Explore the history

Unlike simple navigation maps, such as New Relic maps in context, automap helps you understand how problems developed by allowing you to scroll backwards and forwards in time. You can also screen out entities you're not interested in.

Timewarp cursor: go back in time

To identify exactly when and where an incident originated, simply move the Timewarp cursor to see health status changes for the entities on the map. If you don't see the Timewarp cursor, click the clock icon in the upper-right of the automap. When you scroll through the history, you see when anomalous behavior was detected by New Relic Lookout.

Here’s an example of scrolling that reveals that the issue occurred between FulfillmentService and BillingService:

Controls: See only what you need to see

With the controls menu available below the Timewarp cursor, you can de-emphasize certain entities on the map by unchecking those options. For example, you can hide the healthy service to focus only on those alerting as you browse the timeline:

Here is an example of how the controls work:

Map symbols

Here's a table showing the various health status icons: