Modern-day users rely on application performance monitoring (APM) to prevent and remedy outages, lags, and crashes in software applications. APM provides real-time data about application performance and end-user satisfaction, empowering teams to overcome issues before customers notice. To get started with New Relic APM, it's essential to standardize application names, add labels to applications, create alert policies, identify key transactions, and leverage powerful reporting capabilities. Standardizing application names helps avoid confusion, adding labels enables easy identification of specific applications, creating alert policies ensures timely notification of performance issues, identifying key transactions allows tracking of critical business-critical processes, and leveraging reporting capabilities provides visibility into historical trends and big-picture insights across the entire application stack. By implementing these best practices, organizations can optimize their APM strategy and improve overall software reliability and user experience.