How to view and analyze your changes in New Relic

After setting up change tracking, you can analyze how deployments, feature flags, and other modifications impact your system performance. This page shows you how to access change tracking data, view changes across your system, and understand their impact on performance metrics.

For example, if something is wrong with your system, you can view all of the changes from your system in one place and correlate them with system performance metrics of your choice to quickly identify problematic changes.

Access change tracking

You can access change tracking data in New Relic through two main views, depending on your analysis needs.

• Change Tracking across all entities page
• Change Tracking page for entity-scoped view

Global view across all entities

The Change Tracking across all entities page displays a consolidated view of change events for all accounts and entities on one page. It enables you to:

• Review changes across all accessible accounts and entities.
• Filter change events by account, entity, deployment type, and other attributes to refine results.
• Add a timeseries query to visualize change events against timeseries data across various entities and accounts.

To access the global view:

Go to one.newrelic.com > All Capabilities > Change Tracking.

The Change Tracking across all entities page displays the change events for all entities and accounts for which you have access. You can view these events in the two components:

• Change events table: This table lists change events from your accessible accounts. Each event in the table is also marked on the time-series chart.

  • To refine the list of change events shown, use the filter bar to select attributes such as account name, entity name, custom attributes, and more.
  • Adjust the displayed time range using the time picker, or by clicking and dragging a selection directly on the chart.

• Change events time-series chart: Run a NRQL query and view the results on this chart with change events overlaid. This visualization helps you correlate data trends (such as spikes or dips) with specific system changes across your accounts.

See how your changes are recorded across your estate

Every change tracking event records how it was created, so you can review the recording method and the calling client for all of your changes in one place — across every account and entity you have access to.

Every event records a newrelic.source attribute, which identifies which change tracking API was used to create the event:

Alongside newrelic.source, change tracking records details about the client that made the call:

What you can use this for:

• Audit how changes are recorded: See which changes use NerdGraph (changeTrackingCreateEvent or changeTrackingCreateDeployment) versus the REST APIs across all your entities and accounts — for example, to standardize on a single method.
• Identify the tools recording changes: Use instrumentation.provider and instrumentation.source to see which CI/CD systems, scripts, or libraries are recording changes across your estate.
• Check consistency across teams: Facet by newrelic.source to see which recording method each entity or team uses — for example, to spot teams still recording through the REST APIs while others have moved to NerdGraph.
• Verify a migration: After moving off the REST APIs, confirm no new changes are still arriving with an api.rest.* source.

In the UI:

1. Open the global view at one.newrelic.com > All Capabilities > Change Tracking.
2. Add columns such as entity name, newrelic.source, user, instrumentation.provider, instrumentation.name, instrumentation.source, and instrumentation.language so you can review each entry without opening it.
3. Use the filter bar to narrow the change events table — for example, filter on newrelic.source LIKE 'api.rest%' to see only changes recorded through the REST APIs reaching end of life.

With NRQL:

Run this query in the query builder or through NerdGraph to see how changes are recorded across your estate, grouped by API and client:

FROM Deployment, ChangeTrackingEvent
SELECT count(*)
FACET newrelic.source, instrumentation.provider, instrumentation.name
SINCE 3 months ago LIMIT MAX

To list the individual changes recorded through the REST APIs reaching end of life — with the caller's user agent, detected tool, and language — add the api.rest% filter:

FROM Deployment, ChangeTrackingEvent
SELECT entity.name, version, user, newrelic.source, instrumentation.name, instrumentation.provider, instrumentation.source, instrumentation.language
WHERE newrelic.source LIKE 'api.rest%'
SINCE 3 months ago LIMIT MAX

Entity-specific view

The entity-scoped Change Tracking view displays change events for a specific entity, such as APM, browser, or mobile. It also offers additional information related to golden signals for each change event. You can also use provided filters to view specific change events for that entity.

To access entity-specific change tracking:

1. Go to one.newrelic.com > All Entities.

   Tip

   If you've opted for Catalogs, then instead of All Entities, you'll see Catalogs in the left navigation. Go to one.newrelic.com > Catalogs.

2. Select your required entity.

3. Click Change tracking in the left navigation.

View your changes

Once you've set up change tracking, you can view change markers and events in several locations throughout New Relic.

In charts and dashboards

Change markers appear as vertical lines with pinheads on time-series charts across APM, browser, mobile, and custom dashboards. Click the pinhead to drill into the change's impact on entity health and performance.

How markers are selected for charts

Charts display markers based on the underlying NRQL query and related entities:

1. Direct entity specification: Charts show markers for entities explicitly mentioned in the query using entity.guid, entityGuid, entity.name, entityName, appName, or service.name
2. Related entities: Markers also appear for entities connected through these relationship types: CALLS, SERVES, IS, CONTAINS, HOSTS

In entity pages

Access the change tracking table from any entity by clicking Change tracking in the entity sidebar.

In alerts and activity streams

• Alerts & Issues: Changes related to issues appear in the Overview section.
• Activity streams: View recorded changes in the activity feed on the right panel across various New Relic pages.

Analyze change impact

New Relic provides several tools to help you understand how changes affect your system performance and user experience.

In change details page

Click any change marker or event to open the Change details page. It contains the data you sent when you recorded the change including custom attributes plus a wealth of information about its impact.

Key impact insights:

• Net impact calculations: See percentage changes in key metrics like throughput, error rate, and response time by comparing equal time periods before and after the change.
• Faceted findings: View related data from errors inbox, log monitoring, AIOps issues, incidents, and anomalies.
• Entity relationships: Links to related entities help you trace impact across your system.
• Change metadata: All submitted data from when the change was recorded.

Tip

Pay attention to the selected before/after time period. Adjust it using the time picker if it's too short or long for meaningful analysis.

Adjust comparison periods

Use the time picker in the top-right corner to change the before/after comparison period. This affects:

• Time-series charts and trend lines
• Net impact calculations and averages
• Data-driven insights throughout the page

Important

The UI won't calculate net impacts if the elapsed time since the change is less than your selected period, as this would produce skewed results.

Compare changes

Use the compared with dropdown next to the time picker to compare the current change with another recorded change. This enables:

• Comparative charts: Each time-series chart shows curves for both changes.
• Relative performance analysis: Compare metrics between two different changes.
• Difference calculations: See percentage increases/decreases between changes.
• Stacked views: Open up to five related changes for comprehensive comparison.

Web transaction analysis

For APM applications, the Web transaction impacts section shows how up to ten of your most time-consuming web transactions were affected by the change.

Features:

• Metric selection: Use the dropdown to view different performance metrics.
• Time window awareness: Results reflect your selected before/after period.
• Comparative analysis: Shows side-by-side comparison when comparing with another change.
• Transaction details: Hover over transaction names for performance summaries and links to detailed views.

Custom trend boards

You can create up to three custom trend boards for your changes to answer specific questions about your system's behavior. These boards let you:

• Select any metrics or events available to your entity.
• Apply aggregation functions such as average, max, min, count, etc.
• Integrate with the change details page time window and comparison settings.
• Export to dashboards for ongoing monitoring to a specific entity and to your user account.

To add a custom trend board:

1. Go to one.newrelic.com > All Entities and select your entity.

   Tip

   If you've opted for Catalogs, then instead of All Entities, you'll see Catalogs in the left navigation. Go to one.newrelic.com > Catalogs and select your entity.

2. Click Change tracking in the left navigation pane, and select a change.

3. Under the charts for Key impacts, click Add any metric or event.

4. Click What do you want to track and select a metric or event.

5. Click How do you want to aggregate that? and select a function.

Example use cases:

• How did average page view response time change?
• What was the maximum error rate before vs. after?
• How did database query performance trends shift?

Data retention and limits

Understanding data constraints helps you plan your analysis approach:

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