How to: Remove an Application from the New Relic Applications Dashboard

How to: Remove an Application from the New Relic Applications Dashboard

The New Relic agent is a powerful  lightweight agent that helps you monitor the performance of your Web Application. Thanks to it you can identify potential problems, measure performance, and deliver a better user experience.

Now, New Relic won’t let you delete an application that is active and it won’t let you merge sites which are the same but you just changed the name… so the only option is to uninstall the New Relic plugin for like an hour so that their site lets you delete your apps.

This feels to me like a considerable user experience design flaw. If you have an Application which starts reporting the default name and then decide to change it (seems like a likely scenario) you are stuck with your old Application and the new one. And for some reason the old one doesn’t seem like it wants to go away… maybe I just had to wait more than an hour for it to gray out and allow me to delete. Regardless, I was done waiting and had a bunch of additional sites I wanted out of my sight (not just hidden).

So if you want to remove an Application from the New Relic Applications Dashboard I suggest the following:

1. Uninstall the New Relic Application Agent
2. Uninstall the New Relic Server Agent
3. Wait patiently for about an hour. After New Relic stops receiving information it weights about an hour until it declares the application potentially permanently offline. At that point it will give you the option to delete it
4. Click on the delete text over the grayed out Application on the Dashboard.

Unfortunately this seems a pretty complicated way to do something rather simple. I was using the New Relic PHP plugin for Ubuntu. As long as you don’t use the purge option while uninstalling you should be able to retain your settings so no big deal I figured.