APM (host-based) subscription usage

Important

This doc is for accounts on our original Product-based pricing. If you're on the newer pricing plan, see New Relic One pricing plan. Not sure which you're on? See Overview of pricing plans.

For accounts on our original pricing plan, this doc explains how New Relic calculates billable usage for APM accounts that have host-based pricing (not CU-based pricing). This document also provides available subscription usage attributes and example NRQL queries to use in the New Relic UI or with API calls.

Data generation

Once per day, an APM account will generate an NrDailyUsage event for:

Every application instance that existed during the last 24 hours
Every unique host on which an application instance ran during the last 24 hours

These two types of events allow your usage data to be queried and analyzed in many different ways. To query the application events, use a usageType attribute value of Application. To query the host events, use a usageType attribute value of Host.

All APM events use a productLine attribute value of APM. For more information, see APM query examples.

Usage calculations

For host-based APM pricing, monthly billable usage is determined by the number of equivalent hosts used during that month. An equivalent host is defined as: 750 hours (standardized number of monthly hours) of connection to New Relic by a host or multiple hosts. For more on this calculation, see host-based pricing.

Tip

Only the account Owner and Admins can view the usage UI. However, anyone in your account can query usage data using the NrDailyUsage event.

To get an estimate of the current month's billable usage:

Go to the usage UI.
On the APM usage page, set the time picker to Current month.
See the Avg daily equivalent hosts for an account or grouping of accounts.

The UI is meant to estimate your host usage but, especially for cloud environments, your usage may go up or down over time. For more information about the usage UI, see Introduction to New Relic subscription usage data.

Table definitions

Here are definitions of the column headers in the UI table and CSV files. The columns you see depend on the Group by option selected at the top of the page.

Header	Definition
Account name	The name of the account. This can be a standalone account, a parent account or a customer partnership.
Account ID	New Relic account ID.
Host ID	The unique identifier for that host. If the host is in AWS, we use the AWS-provided instance ID. For other hosts, New Relic assigns a host ID. For more about how this value is created, see `hostID`.
Agent hostname	The name of the host, as reported by the agent. For more about this value, see `agentHostname`.
Average daily equivalent hosts	Average equivalent hosts for that day. Calculated as the total number of hours reported for all unique hosts in a day, divided by 24. For more on how this is calculated, see Host-based pricing.
% of total usage	The percentage of the total usage used.

General attributes

The following are general (not APM-specific) account-related attributes. These attributes can help you understand how your accounts are using New Relic products.

Attribute	Description
`consumingAccountId`	ID of the New Relic account that is directly responsible for the stored events, as determined from the license key used.
`consumingAccountName`	Name of the New Relic account that is directly responsible for the stored events, as determined from the license key used.
`masterAccountId`	The ID of the parent account that is either responsible for stored events or that is the parent of the consuming account. When a parent account is the consuming account, `masterAccountId` is the `consumingAccountId`. This attribute is present even for accounts that do not have a parent account. This is to ensure continued reporting if the account is later made a parent account.
`masterAccountName`	Name of the parent account that is either responsible for stored events, or that is the parent of the consuming account. When a parent account is the consuming account, `masterAccountName` is the `consumingAccountName`. This attribute is present even for accounts that do not have a parent account. This is to ensure continued reporting if the account is later made a parent account.
`partnershipId`	Partner ID of the New Relic customer partnership associated with the account responsible for the stored events. This attribute is only present if the consuming account is associated with a New Relic customer partnership.
`partnershipName`	Name of the New Relic customer partnership associated with the account responsible for the stored events. This attribute is only present if the consuming account is associated with a customer partnership.
`subAccountId`	ID of the child account that is responsible for the stored event. When this attribute is present, `subAccountId` is the `consumingAccountId`. This attribute is only present if the consuming account is a child account (not a parent account).
`subAccountName`	Name of the child account responsible for stored events. When present, this attribute is the same as the `consumingAccountName`. This attribute is only present if the consuming account is a child account (not a parent account).
`timestamp`	UNIX timestamp (seconds since epoch) of the day and time when event generation was initiated.

APM attributes (host-based)

The following are usage-related attributes generated by host-based APM accounts (not CU-based APM). To query APM-specific data, use a productLine attribute value of APM.

Attribute	Description
`agentHostname`	ID reported by the agent to uniquely identify the host for which this usage event is reported. This value can come from several sources in the application’s environment, but commonly is the value returned by the `gethostname` Linux syscall. In Docker environments, this attribute can take on the value (sometimes truncated) of the Docker container ID. `agentHostname` is one of three possible providers for the `hostId` value.
`apmAgentVersion`	Version of the New Relic APM agent running in the application instance reporting this usage. Present only for events where `usageType` equals `Application`. To update your agent version, see Update the New Relic agent.
`apmAppId`	ID uniquely identifying the application that is reporting this usage, as it appears in the APM product. Present only for events where `usageType` equals `Application`.
`apmAppName`	Name of the application reporting this usage, as it appears in the APM product. Present only for events where `usageType` equals `Application`.
`apmHoursUsed`	Number of hours for which usage was recorded for the given entity. When an entity is connected to New Relic for any amount of time within a given hour, that hour is counted toward usage. When calculating monthly APM host usage, the calculation for equivalent hosts for a month assumes that a standard month has 750 hours: `apmHoursUsed / 750`.
`apmLanguage`	Name of the language that the usage-reporting application is written in, as reported by the New Relic agent. Examples: `ruby`, `java`, `python`. Present only for events where `usageType` equals `Application`.
`bootId`	Linux boot ID of host for which this usage is reported, which is unique for each boot lifetime of each Linux operating system instance. Will only be present when the New Relic agent is one of the following versions: Go: 1.11 or higher Java: 3.42.0 or higher .NET: 6.19.330.0 or higher Node.js: 2.1.0 or higher PHP: 7.5.0.199 or higher Python: 2.90.0.75 or higher Ruby: 4.4.0.336 or higher `bootId` is one of three possible providers for the `hostId` value.
`cloudInstanceId`	ID uniquely identifying the cloud host instance (example: an AWS EC2 instance) for which this usage is reported. (For example, for an AWS EC2 instance, the value would look like `i-1234abcd5678ef900`.) This is used to uniquely identify the host if the `apmComputeUnitRule` is `cloud_provider_data`. This will not be present if no cloud provider was detected by the agent. Agents with these versions will detect cloud provider data for AWS: Go: 1.11 or higher Java: 3.18.0 or higher .NET: 5.1.72.0 or higher Node.js: 1.21.0 or higher PHP: 5.5.0 or higher Python: 2.54.0.41 or higher Ruby: 3.12.1.298 or higher `cloudInstanceId` is one of three possible providers for the `hostId` value.
`cloudInstanceType`	Instance type of the host as defined by the cloud provider and detected by the agent. For example: `c4.2xlarge`. This will not be present if no cloud provider was detected by the agent.
`cloudProvider`	Name of the cloud provider for this host. Example values: `aws`, `azure`. This will not be present if no cloud provider was detected by the agent.
`cloudZone`	Name of the zone that a cloud provider host is located in. For example: `eu-central-1b`. This will not be present if no cloud provider was detected by the agent.
`containerId`	ID of the Docker or other Linux container in which the application instance is running. This will not be present if a container was not detected by the agent. Present only for events where `usageType` equals `Application`. This attribute is not used to uniquely identify hosts for billing purposes.
`hostId`	ID used to uniquely identify the host for which this usage is reported. Any given hour of APM usage for this host will be counted only once when calculating `apmHoursUsed`. There are several possible host identifiers reported by the New Relic agent. The attributes, if present, will be chosen to use in this order of precedence: `cloudInstanceId`, `bootId`, `agentHostname`.
`productLine`	The New Relic product the usage data is from. Always use the value `APM` when querying for APM CU usage data.
`usageType`	For APM, this value can be either `Application` or `Host`, depending on the type of entity this event records usage for (other New Relic products will have different values for `usageType`). Events with both values are recorded so that usage data can be analyzed in several ways. For `Application`: the event represents usage for a single unique application instance for that day. For `Host`: the event represents usage for a single unique host for that day. Only `Host` entities are used to calculate billable usage. `Application` entities are useful for comparing usage between applications, but are not used for billing or contract purposes.

Query examples

Here are some examples of NRQL queries you can use with your account usage data. You can run NRQL queries and use the resulting charts in dashboards.

This query uses New Relic’s standard number of hours per month (750) for the purpose of calculating APM equivalent hosts over the last month.

SELECT sum(apmHoursUsed)/750 
AS 'Equivalent hosts' 
FROM NrDailyUsage 
WHERE usageType='Host' 
AND productLine='APM' 
SINCE last month 
UNTIL this month

New Relic records usage per application instance, not strictly per application. This query gives an approximation of the usage for a given application on a given host. If unique application instances run sequentially on a host within a given day, this query could return an underestimate (this would be likely, for example, in a container environment).

SELECT max(apmHoursUsed) 
FROM NrDailyUsage 
WHERE usageType='Application' 
AND productLine='APM' 
FACET consumingAccountName,consumingAccountId,apmAppName,hostId 
SINCE 1 day ago 
LIMIT 2000

This query measures the total number of hours used by all instances (processes) of an application in the last 24 hours. It's useful for determining which applications are responsible for APM usage, but does not return results that match precisely how New Relic prices APM usage.

Each application instance is counted separately in this query, even if it runs concurrently with another application instance on the same host, so the number of application instance-hours is likely to be greater than the number of host-hours (the billable quantity).

SELECT sum(apmHoursUsed) 
FROM NrDailyUsage 
WHERE usageType='Application' 
AND productLine='APM' 
FACET consumingAccountName,consumingAccountId,apmAppName 
SINCE 1 day ago 
LIMIT 2000

Use this query to see which agent versions are running on your applications in the last 24 hours. This information can be useful in determining whether the agent needs to be upgraded to report a more accurate host name in a Docker container environment (either a Linux boot ID or a cloud provider instance ID).

FROM NrDailyUsage 
SELECT count(*) 
WHERE productLine='APM' 
AND usageType='Application' 
FACET consumingAccountId, consumingAccountName, apmAppName, apmAgentVersion, apmLanguage 
SINCE 1 day ago 
LIMIT 2000

This query is useful for seeing the account hierarchy (partnership, parent accounts, child accounts).

SELECT count(*) 
FROM NrDailyUsage 
FACET partnershipName,masterAccountName,masterAccountId,consumingAccountName,consumingAccountId 
LIMIT 2000 
SINCE 1 day ago

This query produces a close approximation of the CSV report you would have seen in the deprecated UI system:

FROM NrDailyUsage 
SELECT consumingAccountId 
AS 'Account ID', hostId, cloudProvider 
AS 'Host provider', cloudInstanceType 
AS 'Instance type', apmBillingInstanceSize 
AS 'Instance size', apmHoursUsed 
AS 'Hours used', apmComputeUnits 
AS 'Usage (CU)', apmMemoryBytes/(1024*1024*1024) 
AS 'Total RAM', apmProcessorCount 
AS 'Logical processors', apmContainerCount 
AS 'Container count', apmComputeUnitRule 
AS 'Business rule', missingCpuData, missingRamData, instanceSizeCapped, cloudZone, cloudInstanceId 
WHERE productLine='APM' 
AND usageType='Host' 
SINCE 1 day ago 
LIMIT 2000

This NRQL query is different than the legacy usage report:

Per-host query	Comments
Time period	This query includes only the last 24 hours of usage. To see the usage aggregated over a longer time period, change the `SINCE` clause.
Results limited to a maximum number of rows	NRQL limits the number of rows returned. If you have more hosts than the maximum number of rows returned and want to get the complete set of hosts, you can narrow your query with more `WHERE` clauses to return subsets of the data (for example `WHERE cloudInstanceId LIKE “%0”`) to divide the data into up to 16 groups, modulo the last character in the AWS instance ID.
Docker container IDs	A single Docker container ID does not appear in this report. A Docker container ID is reported only at the application instance level of granularity (`usageType='Application'`). For the host (`usageType='Host'`), a count of unique containers is reported, since there are often very many. While choosing just one container ID to report for a host had been informative, now there is more data reported at the appropriate level of granularity.
Business rule	`Business rule` has been replaced with other attributes. It no longer is used to describe whether the agent needs to be updated.

This query returns data once provided in the "host usage report": a listing of applications running on each host. Note that while APM usage is counted on an hour-by-hour basis, per-hour usage data is no longer available via the API or UI.

FROM NrDailyUsage 
SELECT min(timestamp) 
AS 'Earliest reporting day',max(timestamp) 
AS 'Latest reporting day' 
FACET apmAppName,hostId,agentHostname,consumingAccountName,consumingAccountId 
WHERE usageType='Application' 
AND productLine='APM' 
SINCE 1 month ago 
LIMIT 2000

Use of Docker and other containers

Some previous New Relic APM agents may miscount containers as hosts, which may lead to over-reporting of host-based usage.

To fix this calculation for Linux-based containers (including Docker), upgrade your APM agent to these versions:

Go: 1.11 or higher
Java: 3.42.0 or higher
.NET: 6.19.330.0 or higher
Node.js: 2.1.0 or higher
PHP: 7.5.0.199 or higher
Python: 2.90.0.75 or higher
Ruby: 4.4.0.336 or higher

For more help

If you need more help, check out these support and learning resources:

Browse the Explorers Hub to get help from the community and join in discussions.
Find answers on our sites and learn how to use our support portal.
Run New Relic Diagnostics, our troubleshooting tool for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Review New Relic's and and documentation.

Important

Data generation

Usage calculations

Tip

Table definitions

General attributes

APM attributes (host-based)

Query examples

Usage for last month

Usage per host per application

Instance-hours per application

Agent version information

Account hierarchy

Legacy per-host usage report

Legacy host usage report (application listing)

Use of Docker and other containers

For more help

APM (host-based) subscription usage

Important

Data generation

Usage calculations

Tip

Table definitions

General attributes

APM attributes (host-based)

Query examples

Usage per host per application

Instance-hours per application

Agent version information

Account hierarchy

Legacy per-host usage report

Legacy host usage report (application listing)

Use of Docker and other containers

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For more help