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Magento monitoring vs APM: 'is it fast?' is not 'is it working?' 2026-08-20 · Byte8 Team Every "best Magento monitoring tools" listicle names the same four: New Relic, Datadog, Blackfire, Tideways. They're all excellent - and they all answer the same question: *is the site fast?* That's application performance monitoring, and it's essential. But "is it fast?" is not the same job as "is it working?" - whether a customer can browse, search, and buy right now, and whether the money is actually landing. A Magento store can be lightning-fast and quietly broken at the same time, and your APM dashboard will stay green through every second of it. Magento monitoring vs APM: what's the difference? Application performance monitoring (APM) measures how the system performs: response time, throughput, database time, memory, and the stack traces behind slow or failing requests. It answers "is it fast, and is the code healthy?" Business-outcome monitoring measures whether the store's actual job is getting done: can a customer complete checkout, is search returning products, is content un-tampered, are orders and payments flowing. It answers "is it working, and is it still making money?" Both are monitoring. They watch different layers, catch different failures, and neither substitutes for the other. The trap is owning only the first and believing a green performance dashboard means a healthy store. What APM and profilers are genuinely great at. Be fair to the four names above, because they're very good at their job. * New Relic and Datadog are APM: distributed tracing, database query time, throughput, PHP exceptions, infrastructure metrics. When checkout is slow, they show you the N+1 query, the saturated connection pool, or the third-party call adding 600ms. * Blackfire and Tideways are profilers: they walk a single request and point at the exact function eating 800ms, so a performance fix lands on the real cause instead of a guess. If your TTFB is creeping, a page got heavy, or the database is the bottleneck, these are the correct tools and nothing here replaces them. But notice what they're built to answer: a *performance* question. A failure that isn't slow and doesn't throw an exception sits, by design, outside their field of view. Why a fast Magento store can still be broken. Here are four failures that are fast, green, and exception-free - and still cost you customers: * A 200-but-broken checkout. A JavaScript regression after a deploy breaks the "Place Order" button. The server happily serves 200 OK for every checkout page; no customer can actually pay. APM sees fast, healthy responses. * An injected card skimmer. A few lines of JavaScript are slipped into a CMS block or a "Miscellaneous HTML" config field. They load on every page in 400ms and copy card details at checkout. Fast, cached, exception-free - and quietly stealing cards. * A drifted indexer. The category indexer falls into an invalid state and product listing pages render zero products. Every page returns 200 in good time. Customers land in an empty shop. * An uncaptured payment. An order is authorised at checkout, goes to fulfilment, and ships - but the *capture* that actually collects the money silently fails. Nothing errors, nothing is slow. You find it weeks later, reconciling the bank against your orders. None of these is a performance problem. None throws an exception. Each one returns HTTP 200. That is *precisely* why an APM dashboard stays green - and why "is it fast?" can't protect revenue on its own. The failures split neatly by whether a performance tool can even see them: failure slow? throws? HTTP APM sees it? - - - - - broken "Place Order" (JS) no no 200 no injected card skimmer no no 200 no drifted indexer / empty PLP no no 200 no uncaptured payment no no 200 no N+1 query on checkout YES no 200 yes unhandled PHP exception maybe YES 500 yes APM catches the bottom two beautifully. The top four are invisible to it - not through misconfiguration, but because they're the wrong shape for a performance tool to detect. The layer APM can't reach. To answer "is it working?", you need two things a trace can't give you: a real browser, and a way to read Magento's own state. From the outside - a real browser. Synthetic checks load the store in real Chromium, not a HEAD request, and walk the funnel: open a product, add to cart, go to cart, enter shipping, reach payment. Each step is timed independently and the browser captures console.error and unhandled exceptions along the way. When a deploy breaks add-to-cart, the check fails at that exact step and names the JavaScript error - instead of a vague "site down" the next morning. From the inside - Magento's own state. Some failures are upstream of the page: an indexer mid-drift, a cron about to cause a backlog, OpenSearch gone red, a skimmer injected into a CMS block. A read-only health endpoint surfaces them - Pulsar's exposes 20 collectors, each mapped to one silent failure: indexer state, cron heartbeat, queue depth, OpenSearch health, stuck pending_payment orders, content integrity, SSL expiry, admin 2FA coverage, and more. This is the layer Pulsar occupies. It doesn't profile your code or trace your queries - that's what your APM is for. It watches the business outcome. A note on honesty, because this category is still maturing: a broken checkout, a drifted indexer, and an injected skimmer are all things you can watch continuously *today*. Others - reconciling that every authorised order was actually captured, for instance - are harder problems that monitoring is still growing into. "Is it working?" is a bigger question than any single tool has fully answered, and pretending otherwise helps no one. APM vs business-outcome monitoring, side by side. * What it watches: APM - the system (traces, DB time, memory, exceptions). Business-outcome - the funnel and Magento's state (checkout, search, content, orders). * The question it answers: APM - *"is it fast?"* Business-outcome - *"is it working?"* * The failure it's built to catch: APM - a slow query, a saturated server, a thrown exception. Business-outcome - a 200-but-broken checkout, a live skimmer, a drifted indexer. * Its blind spot: APM - anything that's fast, green, and exception-free. Business-outcome - a slow-but-working store (that's APM's job, not this layer's). * When it pages you: APM - latency and error-rate thresholds. Business-outcome - a real customer action stops working. Common questions. Is APM enough to monitor a Magento store? No. APM tells you whether the store is fast and whether the code is throwing errors - necessary, but not sufficient. The failures that most directly cost revenue (a broken "Place Order" button, an injected skimmer, a drifted indexer) are fast and exception-free, so they never reach an APM dashboard. You need a layer that checks the business outcome as well. Does business-outcome monitoring replace New Relic or Datadog? No - it complements them. New Relic and Datadog answer performance and infrastructure questions nothing else answers as well. Pulsar answers "can a customer still buy?", a different question on a different layer. Run both; they catch different failures. What can synthetic checkout monitoring catch that APM can't? A synthetic check drives the real funnel in a real browser, so it fails the moment a customer *can't* complete a step - even when every underlying HTTP response is a fast 200. A JavaScript error that breaks add-to-cart, a payment step that no longer renders, a shipping method that vanished after a deploy: invisible to a trace, caught by a browser that actually tries to buy. Where do profilers like Blackfire and Tideways fit? They're for performance work, not availability. Once you've found a slow page - often *via* APM or a synthetic timing - a profiler tells you which function to fix. They answer "why is this slow?", not "is the store working?". You don't choose - you layer. This was never "replace New Relic with Pulsar." Keep your APM; it does a job nothing else does, and a fast store is genuinely worth engineering for. The mistake is stopping there and reading a green performance dashboard as proof the store is healthy. Add the layer that watches the outcome - the funnel, the content, the internal state - and "the store is up" finally starts to mean "customers can buy." Fast is table stakes. Working is the revenue. Enjoyed this? Share it with your team.

Lisa Banks is promoted to Principal MarComms Manager, APAC. by Telum Media 6 August 2026 12:13 AM Lisa Banks has stepped up at software development company, New Relic, being promoted to Principal Marketing Communications Manager, APAC. She joined the team in 2021 and was most recently Senior Customer Marketing, Communications and Content Manager, APAC. Lisa's experience spans journalism, tech agency positions, and in-house roles within the education and government sectors. Telum Media creating connections. Book a demo You might also enjoy. Zoe Guest has started as Marketing and Communications Manager at Lagardere AWPL. She was previously Communications Manager at Optus. Prior to this, Zoe worked at a number of agencies and in-house within the health sector. 5 August 2026 11:53 PM Tim Lele has been promoted to the new role of Head of Communications for Golf Australia and the PGA of Australia. He was previously Strategic Communications Manager at Golf Australia. In his new role, he will lead their communications strategy, media relations, editorial storytelling, stakeholder engagement and internal communications functions across both organisations. Tim previously worked agency-side at Keep Left for more than a decade, where he most recently held the role of National Director of Public Relations. 5 August 2026 11:43 PM Industry update Independent Indian PR firm, Media Mantra, has launched new Australian operations under the brand Media Mantra Global. Operating out of offices in Sydney's Hunters Hill, the move represents the agency's strategic expansion into the Asia-Pacific region, with a stated vision of becoming a "globally integrated communications partner for brands looking to scale across international markets." With established operations in India and the UAE, the Australia launch strengthens Media Mantra Global's growing international presence, enabling the agency to offer integrated public relations, corporate communications, digital marketing, influencer marketing, content, and brand reputation services across multiple geographies. The Sydney office will cater to Australian businesses looking to expand into India and the Middle East while also supporting Indian and global brands seeking strategic communications expertise in Australia. Founder and CEO, Udit Pathak, said the Australian office is more than just an international expansion: "...it is a defining moment for Media Mantra Global and, I believe, for the Indian PR industry. We have always believed that Indian communications agencies can compete with the very best globally through strategic thinking, innovation, and execution excellence. "Australia is an important market with immense opportunities, and this expansion enables us to build stronger cross-border communication strategies for brands operating across India, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region." 5 August 2026 5:12 AM 2 mins read

Introducing New Relic eBPF Logs - now in Public Preview. Application logs collected automatically by the eBPF agent and correlated to your services - no code changes or new agent to deploy. Application logs are often one of the first places engineers look during an incident. But getting those logs into the same workflow as your metrics and traces can still require another collector, another configuration file, another set of plugins, and another operational surface to secure and maintain. With New Relic's eBPF agent, teams get application monitoring and network visibility from a single deployment without the need of per-language libraries and code changes. It's the simplest path New Relic, Inc. has built to broad, consolidated visibility across your services. That simplicity is powered by eBPF: a secure, sandboxed, and widely adopted Linux technology that lets New Relic observe what's happening on your systems safely and efficiently, without changing a line of your application code. New Relic eBPF delivered application monitoring with automatic discovery came first, then eBPF Network Metrics and APM. But one signal was still collected outside it: your logs. Today, New Relic, Inc. introduce the Public Preview of New Relic eBPF Logs; application logs collected automatically by the eBPF agent and correlated to your services, with no new agent to deploy. One agent, now including logs. If you're already running the eBPF agent, you know the appeal: application monitoring with automatic service discovery and network visibility, all flowing through one lightweight agent you deploy once. eBPF Logs closes that gap by bringing log telemetry into the same unified lifecycle. This consolidation also results in stronger security. Every additional agent is one more component to patch and secure; by collecting logs through the agent you already operate rather than a separate third-party forwarder, you reduce the number of moving parts and shrink the attack surface you have to defend. Logs in context automatically. The point of eBPF Logs isn't just to move logs - it's to make them immediately useful. Because the agent already understands your services, your logs arrive already connected to them. * Automatic collection: the eBPF agent picks up application logs directly from your running services; there's nothing for developers to add to the code. * Auto-linked to your services: the same entity synthesis that powers eBPF application monitoring ties each log line to the service it came from, so Logs in Context lights up automatically. * OpenTelemetry-first: logs are delivered to New Relic's OpenTelemetry endpoint, fitting cleanly into an open, standards-based pipeline. * Safe by design: eBPF observes in a secure, sandboxed, read-only way. It's a proven, broadly adopted approach that adds visibility without changes to your applications or added risk. * You stay in control of your data: New Relic's pipeline control gateway lets you filter sensitive or PII content before it arrives at NRDB. A day in the life: an FX service under pressure. Picture a foreign exchange (FX) service that returns live currency-conversion quotes for a payments platform. During a busy trading window, a share of quote requests starts failing, and some customers see their conversions rejected. * From the FX service entity: you already watch its golden signals and network activity; you notice a spike in errors and climbing latency. * Its logs surface right there in context, correlated to the service automatically. There's no switching tools and no hunting across hosts to find them. * The logs tell the story: a burst of "stale price and rate quote expired" messages and slow responses from an upstream rate provider. The service is rejecting quotes because the provider's prices are arriving too late to safely honor. The Result: instead of guessing whether it's the app, the network, or the provider, you have the exact log evidence in one place within one agent and one workflow. You can fail over to a backup rate feed or adjust timeouts in minutes, not hours. Getting started (Public Preview). * If you already run the New Relic eBPF agent, you are most of the way there. To try eBPF Logs in Public Preview: * Deploy or upgrade the eBPF agent on your Linux hosts or Kubernetes clusters - no need to swap application libraries or restart your apps. [docs link - still to come] * Turn on application log ingestion with the Public Preview opt-in. * Open your service entity and see Logs in Context automatically. Next steps. Try eBPF Logs in Public Preview and see how application logs appear in context with the services you already monitor in New Relic. If you are already using New Relic eBPF, start by upgrading the agent and validating application log capture in a supported environment. If you are new to New Relic eBPF, explore the broader eBPF capabilities, including eBPF Network Metrics and eBPF Logs, to see how kernel-level telemetry can simplify troubleshooting across modern cloud-native systems. Gilbert Tsang is a Senior Product Manager at New Relic focused on observability solutions powered by eBPF and cloud-native technologies. He works closely with engineering teams to develop capabilities that help organizations gain deeper insight into application performance, infrastructure behavior, and network telemetry across distributed systems. Ben Rivera is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at New Relic, focused on OpenTelemetry-first experiences that help platform teams standardize faster and operate telemetry with confidence. The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join New Relic, Inc. exclusively at the Explorers Hub (support.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on such sites. 780+ integrations to start monitoring your stack for free.