FACET-ing New Relic PageViewTiming Data By 'Page Type'

Published: November 7, 2024

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New Relic’s PageViewTiming data set provides excellent visibility into important performance metrics such as Core Web Vitals. When analyzing this data it can be useful to segment it by “page type” — for example, on an ecommerce website it can be helpful to know LCP or CLS scores for the product detail page, or product listing page individually. While it’s possible to view performance metrics for specific page URLs via the default pageUrl field, a website can have thousands (or more) of unique URLs for a given page type. Unless a predictable and consistent pattern is used for all URLs of a specific page type, by default it is not possible to segment data this way.

New Relic “Custom Attributes”

This issue can be solved by using New Relic custom attributes, which will be available when querying the PageViewTiming data set. The browser agent provides a setCustomAttribute function, which can be used for this purpose.

For example, in the case of Magento / Adobe Commerce, the “page type” can be identified consulting the list of classList of the <body> element. The below snippet can be used to quickly and easily set the pageType attribute for the product and category pages.

<script>
    (function() {
        if (!window.newrelic) {
            return;
        }

        if (document.body.classList.contains('catalog-category-view')) {
            newrelic.setCustomAttribute('pageType', 'catalog/category/view');
            return;
        }

        if (document.body.classList.contains('catalog-product-view')) {
            newrelic.setCustomAttribute('pageType', 'catalog/product/view');
            return;
        }
    })();
</script>

Once in place, pageType can be used for FACET-ing and WHERE clauses in your NRQL queries.