New Relic Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

Sr. Principal at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 2, 2015

It gives us the ability to train our people and provide a more responsive application, but the mapping between applications to servers is not very intuitive.

What is most valuable?

I've found the most valuable feature to be--

Being able to drill down to see data, and
Being able to capture all the timing information and different functions.

How has it helped my organization?

It comes in as part of the regular process for every application roll-out. We have a standard visibility process for any application that rolls out. It gives us the ability to train our people and provide a more responsive application. We used to have many tools with many different functions, and now APM allows us to consolidate a lot of it.

What needs improvement?

The mapping between applications to servers is not very intuitive.

Another thing we come across is that our technology just doesn’t have reporting to New Relic, but that can be addressed with a plugin/SDK. However, we can’t really make the case to put in the investment to have that happen yet.

Another thing is that we’re micro-service based, and the New Relic interface only gives us views into the top 100 services out of 50,000. Typically when we monitor our system, we use a heat map, and New Relic only provides us the second-level view of that. Ideally, it would also provide us the first-level view. Eventually, we’d like New Relic to step up to do that.

Finally, it should ideally do two things -

Isolate the problem right away without the user having to do a lot of analysis. Right now, New Relic provides a lot of data points that require me to go in to understand.
It has its own dashboard, and I’d like to be able to bring that/integrate it into our own system (use an API to pull out data).

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Sometimes when we pull data from New Relic, we time-out or drop data, and we can see when that happens, but we're not sure if it’s us or them.

Also, the alerting system has trouble with large alerts that come up slowly, requiring the operator to know the system well (yellow, red, orange) and to know what the alerts mean.

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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It hasn’t scaled quite right now. We use another tool for out-of-gate view. Currently, we manage about 60,000 servers in total and we don’t have a good roll-up view of the entire system. The application on the server side is OK. We use other tools to monitor the environment.

How are customer service and support?

So far, the interactions have been good, and they keep us in the loop as to what’s been done. In terms of the solution, it’s just OK.

How was the initial setup?

I wasn't involved in the setup.

What other advice do I have?

Engage the development community within the company early, and request an integration tool to make implementation easy.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user342189

Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 2, 2015

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We get greater insight into what our application is doing once it’s in production, although some of the aggregates over time tend to become more vague, so you lose resolution.

Valuable Features:

The way some transactions are recorded, you can dig through and see what’s going on with the request, how many times you’re making a certain call. That’s the biggest part – almost like application profiling.

Improvements to My Organization:

We get greater insight into what our application is doing once it’s in production. We can identify issues faster, and being able to identify issues before they become a big problems is an improvement. We use it in load testing to identify inefficient query patterns.

Room for Improvement:

At times some of the data can be opaque. Some of the aggregates over time tend to become more vague, so you lose resolution. Greater resolution going further back in time would be nice. If I start going back a month or two, the resolution is a lot lower, which is kind of challenging and makes it harder to do in-depth historical analysis.

Use of Solution:

Alongside APM, we're using New Relic servers, plugins, and pretty much everything else except Insights, Synthetics, or the mobile product.

Stability Issues:

Pretty stable. Sometimes the charts will fail to load or there are some random errors. But because of the way we use APM, there’s no significant impact.

Scalability Issues:

Our use doesn’t really push the limits of New Relic, but it looks like it will scale just fine.

Initial Setup:

It was already in production when I joined the company.

Other Advice:

I don’t see us being able to operate without New Relic. It’s important to collect a lot of metrics, but it’s more important to identify the ones that are essential to your business purposes. Know which data are really important and what you should keep an eye on.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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it_user341436

Senior Software Engineer with 201-500 employees

Dec 2, 2015

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When there’s a deployment, it shows by graphing if a regression has happened, and it allows us to react. However, every now and then there are little quirks.

What is most valuable?

It helps you to define the transaction percentages, average time, and highest throughput. Also, it tells us the transactions that take the most time on average. Those are the high level, most useful features.

It also tells us about every single request that comes in and how the system reacts to it. You get to see everything from the dashboard, all these breakdowns per layer of your architecture.

Error rate is the second most useful feature – there are alerts tied to that. You get paged when the error rate is above an expected percentage and that has worked very consistently and reliably for us.

How has it helped my organization?

The best thing is that the team has grown, and a lot of people are developing the code, but you tend to have regressions that are clearly visible in those transaction traces.

When there’s a deployment, it shows by graphing if a regression has happened, and it allows us to react. Catching regressions in performance is very important, and since we now see the breakdown in every single layer in the application, you know right away if there’s something you’re not expecting. We can then go and figure out if it’s an infrastructure or code issue. It gives you a high level view of all of the requests coming in. Error rates are a good indicator for potential rollbacks for a potential deployment – and usually it’s pretty instantaneous. At the end of the day as users, we get what we want.

What needs improvement?

For the purposes for which we’re using it, it just works. So far I don’t have any requests for new features.

Currently, it is not the only solution we have for monitoring so there are things that it’s missing – for example what Datadog does for us. Timeline series, custom timelines and graphs, and I’m not aware of those features in New Relic.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Every now and then there are little quirks, like the web site will stop refreshing by itself, or the graphs will show something that’s not happening. But in my experience just refreshing the graphs will fix it. But we’ve never had any downtime with New Relic.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have scaled up as well in terms of number of hosts. There is some perceivable difference in performance when you’re looking at a graph versus number of hosts, but so far it has been fine. It’s definitely not the same looking at a single host versus many hosts.

How are customer service and technical support?

The fact that I’ve never had to contact support by email or phone is a good thing. The online documentation has been fantastic. Everything you want is available in the documentation.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

It was already in production. I did deployments in the staging environment, but not the first deployment. We will be doing the first deployment for mobile as well.

How was the initial setup?

It was already in production. I did deployments in the staging environment, but not the first deployment. We will be doing the first deployment for mobile as well.

What other advice do I have?

You need to understand what’s in their stack, what technologies, what libraries, and it takes someone who has experience with those technologies to help make the decision. It also comes down to best bang for your buck, and I’d definitely recommend New Relic APM.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user266814

Senior Technical Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 12, 2015

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It allowed us to identify exact module/service issues quickly and visually without going through gigabytes of log files.

What is most valuable?

My organization follows SOA architecture to address the overall complexity. We have broken our system into different services according to complexity and functionality. When we serve a customer, multiple services come into picture. To identify the exact time taken by a service or failure in a service, we had two options:

a) Go through the logs and identify the exact issue or time taken by the component (too complex and takes a considerable amount of time).

b) Install an application monitoring system that can measure the performance of different services from the customer themselves and, in the case of issues, identify the issue and/or alert (less time required to diagnose the actual issue with visual representation).

The second option is much better in all scenarios.

The installation for New Relic is butter smooth and hardly took 5 minutes for the first server. It even reduced to less than 2 minutes for additional servers.

How has it helped my organization?

We found the following benefits after installing New Relic:

a) Ability to pin-point the exact module/service creating issues.

b) Lightening fast issue identification since there is no need to go through gigabytes of log files and, since we have a number of servers in our cluster, it isn't even feasible to check each and every server.

c) Access to web page load-time, size, and error tracking, vital for a e-commerce.

What needs improvement?

It would have been great had it provided thread-dump analysis and a few additional JVM-related stats. For reference, we can check JVisualVM.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used this solution for over 3+ Year. We put this system in 2012 and it is still up and running perfectly fine.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

There were no issues encountered at all.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We didn't encounter issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

They were pretty helpful and quick in addressing our concerns.

Technical Support:

10 on a scale of 10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use any other solution.

How was the initial setup?

It was very simple and took minimal effort and time.

What about the implementation team?

New Relic only comes in SaaS flavor and installation is pretty quick. We used our in-house team for implementation.

What was our ROI?

From the perspective of effort and time taken while identifying issues and resolution, we have gained a lot. Not sure about the financial ROI.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It totally depends on the organization's requirements and the effort vs. return one puts in monitoring the system. Although, it would have been great if the licensing cost could be reduced a bit.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes. We evaluated AppDynamics.

What other advice do I have?

Go ahead if you can afford it. You won't regret the decision.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user167271

Senior Unix Engineer + Managing Dir at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Dec 4, 2014

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Most important feature is the real time application performance & capacity reporting - complete product that just works.

What is most valuable?

We are using the SLA reporting, server monitoring and alerting, however the main and most important feature for Mangocam is the real time application performance and capacity reporting. We are also using plugins for memcached and database monitoring and alerting.

How has it helped my organization?

New Relic has changed the way we are dealing with application problems. It's the first place for our administrators to check if we encounter issues. In most cases, New Relic can immediately pinpoint the root cause of the issue, be it application errors, slow transactions, external services, database throughput or high transaction count. New Relic can monitor thresholds and alert if required. We are also using New Relic to help understand performance tests and bottlenecks.

What needs improvement?

Some of the 3rd party plugins could be improved - especially the requirement for java to monitor simple network services is not ideal. Also the pricing / plans may need restructuring as there is a big gap between the free offering and the first paid tier.

For how long have I used the solution?

About three years for Mangocam.com, also at two other companies as IT consultant for the last 4 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We have used the PHP and Java monitoring modules as well as the server monitoring service without many problems. There was an initial glitch with the javascript injection on parts of our site, which has been sorted out quickly with the help of the New Relic support.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None so far. The service is very mature and very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

None so far. However, the amount of servers and services connected is limited.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

We only had to contact the support twice and in both cases the response time and professionalism were exceptional.

Technical Support:

The quality and expertise of the email support was very high, we have no complaints.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have tried different services in the past, which only offered part of the features, but again New Relic is very different - complete product that just works.

How was the initial setup?

Setting up New Relic is very easy and well documented. It's using the standard operating system packaging tools and is straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it in-house.

What was our ROI?

There is no measurable ROI as we are currently utilising the free plan / option.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user68016

Team Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Oct 31, 2013

New Relic for PHP: Web Application Performance Monitoring

The performance of a web application plays a critical role in how an application is perceived by its users. It is important to measure it, identify the causes if it changes and react swiftly to any unexpected changes. This article describes an industry leading tool, New Relic, and how it can be used to monitor and improve your site performance.

Setting up a good web application monitoring system can be tiresome, but it’s well worth it. Without the monitoring tools the only thing we could tell is if our site is performing as expected or not. In order to improve the performance we have to be able to identify the worse performing user actions and profile them independently to pinpoint the cause. New Relic achieves that and more in just a few screens, all without manually adding any profiling code to your application.

New Relic is a real-time application monitoring service, providing various metrics about the performance of your production site, covering everything from application database queries through to the time it takes for the end-user to view a page. This data is then collected, post-processed and converted to simple and clean charts presented in the New Relic web interface. Since the New Relic agent has to collect and report the data, it does add some overhead to the application stack. Unless you’re running a service that has to respond in a few milliseconds, however, the overhead added is minimal and is far outweighed by the value of the reports enabling you to detect and solve problems early.

This article covers both the basic functionality of New Relic (that can be used for free) as well as describing what the Enterprise version has to offer.

Getting Started

The New Relic installation is split into several distinct components:

the agent component – a PHP extension, which collects the data and reports to a locally running New Relic daemon.
the daemon component, acting as a proxy between the PHP agents and New Relic datacenters. The main responsibility of the daemon is to reduce the time of reporting the data to New Relic.
New Relic reporting suite – the main New Relic website, where the data is presented for the user.

Both the agent and the daemon components are installed using the provided newrelic-install script. The script will detect the available PHP installations and deploy the agent extension to all of them.

Please refer to the official documentation for more detailed information regarding the installation and configuration of the New Relic package on your specific platform.

Basic Charts

“Forever. Seriously. That’s right. Free. Just the basics.” (newrelic.com)

While the free version of New Relic does not have all the bells and whistles of the Enterprise version, it does provide some basic, yet useful, feedback regarding your site performance.

Application Performance

If you are interested in an overview of how your application performs at PHP level, this is the chart to look at. It displays the average execution time of your PHP scripts in real time, split into separate layers by their execution type:

time spent to execute database queries
time spent in PHP
external web service calls

Depending on which of the application layers take the most time, different optimisation (or scaling) techniques can be applied.

The time spent in the database can usually be reduced by doing one or more of the following:
- analysing the queries that are executed, ensuring that they are using indexes correctly or creating new indexes for them
- caching the most frequently-accessed and computationally-expensive result sets from the database
- optimising the structure of your application’s data using techniques such as database partitioning
- scaling up the database layer (e.g. adding more slave nodes)
The PHP time is the time that your application is processing the data and good tactics for bringing this down could include:
- caching intermediate results
- optimising the code, using faster algorithms
- adding more webnodes (if the hardware limits are reached)
A few things that can help to optimise the network operations:
- cache everything that can be cached;
- introduce an asynchronous job queue if possible.

Browser Performance

Even if the performance of your application is good, there is no guarantee that the users of the site will get it loaded within a reasonable timescale. The New Relic chart for browser page load time provides an overview of how your website is performing.

Similar to the application performance overview shown previously, this chart is composed of several separate layers:

Web application time tells how long it takes for your application to process the requests. More information about this layer can be seen in the application performance chart shown earlier in this article.
Network time is the time that is spent purely for the user request to travel to your application server and then for the response to reach the browser, disregarding the time spent in the application itself.
To optimise this component one would need to review the network performance of your system architecture by considering the following questions:
- do you compress the response sent to the site users (depending on Accept-Encoding)?
- is it just that the response is huge and some of it can be loaded later?
- is the bandwidth used reaching its limits and you simply need a faster network link?
- would distributing your servers worldwide (see more on this later) help?
DOM Processing includes the time from browsers receiving the HTML until the DOMContentLoaded is fired. The work done by browsers is essentially a preparation to execute your JavaScript logic, thus, it prepares the DOM structure, preloads CSS (if there are any script tags after them) and JavaScript files.
To optimise the site performance at this New Relic layer, there are several actions that can be performed:
- make fewer requests to retrieve JavaScript and CSS files
- minify and compress JavaScript and CSS files
- set caching headers so that static files could be cached by the client
- reduce the number of DOM elements
- use a CDN for the static files
Page Rendering time is the time a browser takes to download everything needed after the DOMContentLoaded event; this is usually the time when all the images are downloaded. Similarly as for the JavaScript and CSS files, the list of actions available to optimise the delivery of static content includes:
- optimising image files
- using CSS sprites instead of multiple images
- using correct caching headers
- using a CDN to bring your content closer to the user (there’s also a chart for that, shown later in this post)

An extended list of rules and how they affect your website’s frontend performance can be found at Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. Also, there are several tools that can help you to analyse the frontend performance such as Yahoo’s YSlow or Google’s PageSpeed.

More information about the Real User Monitoring functionality can be found at How Does Real User Monitoring Work? (New Relic documentation) or How we provide real user monitoring: A quick technical review (New Relic blog).

Throughput Charts

Even if your application is performing very well, it is only performing this way given the request rate at that time. As the number of users on the site increases, new bottlenecks “appear” – which can slow the overall usage of the site or even bring it down. As a result, the rate your application is handling the requests is at least as important as the time it takes for your application to send the response.

There are two separate throughput lines available – one for the browser requests and one the application. The browser throughput tells how many pages were requested per minute. Some of those requests may be served from cache before even reaching the application server, other pages may include additional application requests via Ajax. Thus – the two lines may be completely different and suggest different optimisation targets.

Apdex Rate

In addition to measuring your website performance in time, New Relic provides an Apdex score, which tells how many of your site visitors were satisfied, tolerating or frustrated by the response time of the application.

Once the target times for the browser and application servers are set, it will be used to calculate the Apdex ratio:

satisfied requests are all requests that have completed in less than the target time (T), and “pull” the Apdex score towards 1.0
tolerating requests are those which have taken more than T, but less than 4*T. These requests are given the score of 0.5
frustrated requests are all the rest, and their Apdex score is 0.0

The main difference between using the Apdex ratio and the application response time, is that no one request (outlier) can affect the global ratio more than any other. This makes it a more scientific metric for the global overview of your site’s performance if your goal is to answer the question “what proportion of the site visitors see a page loaded quickly enough?”.

For more information about the Apdex score see the New Relic documentation about this metric.

Worldwide Site Delivery

Is your site performing well for local users? What about the users overseas? The Internet is really fast these days, however it is not instant. The further your user physically is from your servers, the longer distance the information packets will have to travel.

To get a glimpse of how your site is performing for different countries, you could look at the worldwide Apdex chart. New Relic also provides more detailed information for the enterprise customers.

Since the performance problem in this case is usually due to the global network speed, there is no fix that can be applied locally – you’ll need to bring your service closer to the user. Depending on your application needs one or more of the following measures can be employed:

use a CDN to serve static files from local servers
use local dynamic content caching servers for slower areas
implement your service locally for the slower areas

Enterprise Functionality

“The Total Package!”

The basic functionality that New Relic offers for free can give us a lot of valuable insights about the global site performance. We can see what areas need more attention than others and this alone can save some precious time while optimising the site. Yet, it does not provide some of the (sometimes crucial) information; where exactly is the bottleneck?

In addition to the free Lite account New Relic offers two more plans (Standard and Pro) which extend the basic reports and introduce some new ones, allowing you to drill down to the root of performance problems quickly and efficiently.

Application Profile Traces

One of the best features offered to help debug performance problems is the comparison between different web transactions and the ability to see timed application traces of slow calls. New Relic provides charts similar to those described above for each web transaction type (provided that New Relic supports the framework you’re using). Also, a list of slow transaction traces is included with the detailed information.

There are already several tools available to profile your PHP code, such as Xdebug and XHProf. Xdebug is a really powerful development tool as well as offering profiling capabilities. XHProf is simple to configure and relatively easy to use, and there are also companion tools such as XHGui which make life even easier. So what is different about New Relic?

The code profiling trace that New Relic provides is a call tree with only Incl. Wall (absolute and relative) information. This tree alone is not very well suited for a generic code analysis since it does not provide the count of how many times a method was invoked, nor its total time during the application run. The power of it is that it is integrated with all other New Relic features and is easily accessible for a quick review once a slower transaction is detected. In addition to PHP code profiling, New Relic also provides a separate report for slow SQL statements, with their execution times and call counts.

With the help of these integrated traces, finding slower pieces of the application code is a straightforward task, helping to keep the focus on the site as a whole while still being able to detect problems and pinpoint them to the method level.

Compare with Historical Data

In addition to displaying the current state, New Relic also provides a comparison mode. When this mode is turned on, all the basic charts are affected – in addition to the current data they now also provide information from one day and one week ago. This mode is especially useful to show whether the site is performing any better (or worse) than before.

Scalability

How well is your website performing under load? The easiest way to answer that is to look at the scalability chart that New Relic provides. The chart plots the application response time versus the throughput.

This chart can quickly give you an idea about how well your website is responding given that there are a certain number of requests per minute. If the response time is constant as the throughput increases then your site is performing well. However, if you notice that the response time is increasing together with the throughput then it is time to take action. Finding the bottleneck using New Relic should now be an easy task using the database and application code profiling tools described above.

More information about this chart can be found in the New Relic blog.

Final Thoughts

New Relic is an amazing service to monitor your web application. It is simple and powerful – all the numbers are presented in such a way that a quick glance to the chart enables one to tell a lot about the site’s performance. In this blog post we have reviewed the common problems that New Relic can help us to detect and provided several suggestions of how to fix them.

Also, it is probably worthwhile mentioning that while New Relic is very good at what it does, it is a service to monitor your application and it usually works best if combined with a separate system to monitor the server resources or the performance of each service you’re using – understanding how the whole application ecosystem behaves is essential in order to build a stable and well performing web service.

https://techportal.inviqa.com/2013/03/14/new-relic-for-php-web-application-performance-monitoring/

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user4968

Developer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Mar 11, 2013

I’ve used new relic with my rails apps for over a year now and like the service a lot

I’ve used new relic with my rails apps for over a year now and like the service a lot. I recently noticed that they have integration with php so I decided to get the php agent configured on my server so I could get stats on an upcoming symfony 2 app.

I use Nginx / PHP-fpm to run my php apps on ubuntu. The install instructions on the new relic site worked pretty well except for one minor quirk.

I had to install php5-dev so that the new relic install script had php-config to execute to find out information about my install. After that, the install script kept complaining that it could not find a valid php install on the system.

With this particular setup, new relic would look for php in /usr/bin/php (from the php-config script) but that did not exist. There was /usr/bin/php5-fpm and /usr/bin/php5-cgi.

I created a symlink for /usr/bin/php and reran the install script.

Success!

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user347676

Director of IT/Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Dec 5, 2015

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Implementing it with our app servers gave us visibility into our Java code and JVMs during user issues. Yet, Synthetics would be more useful if it didn't have to learn another analytics language.

What is most valuable?

The APM Transaction monitoring is the most valuable feature. Being able to define key transactions and collect traces has been essential to providing actionable data for fixes and improvements.

How has it helped my organization?

Early in our app lifecycle we would receive random reports of slow response times from users. Of course, they were never reproducible in our QA environments nor did our OS-specific monitoring tools show any problems. Implementing the APM with our app servers gave us visibility into what our Java code and JVMs were doing at the time users had problems. This allowed us to zero in on infrastructure and code issues as well as implement monitoring cases specific to our app.

What needs improvement?

Last year, there were several New Relic outages where alerts were either fired in error or not fired at all. These have been remedied over the last year, but it negatively impacted our trust in using New Relic as our sole source of analysis and alerting.

As far as suggested improvements, the Synthetics module could be much more useful if one did not have to learn yet another analytics query language.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used New Relic in production since mid-2013.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Since we use a 1.x version of Play Framework, there were some initial challenges in implementing the Java APM agent. The later versions of the agent have drastically improved since then and deployments are considerably less cumbersome.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The aforementioned outages and issues were vexing but, fortunately, are well in the past.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Generally excellent.

Technical Support:

Generally excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

New Relic was an add-on to our existing operations analytics systems. We selected New Relic solely on the basis of the application monitoring feature which our existing systems did not provide.

How was the initial setup?

Once we overcame the challenges of implementing the early Java agent, the remainder of the implementation was effortless. We had 90% functionality within the first 12 hours of implementation.

What about the implementation team?

I performed the implementation personally.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

At our usage level, the cost has been trivial compared to our overall operations monthly costs. What the product has done for us was expedite our ability to discover actionable data that led directly to improvements in our app which would have taken considerable longer if we'd had to build similar functionality ourselves.

Whilst it may be tempting to instrument all of your production and non-production environments, this is a tool that is best used where appropriate, rather than as a blanket deployment.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated building similar functionality ourselves using open source JVM monitoring and log analysis tools. We also evaluated a few semi-competitors. The home-brewed solution would have required additional engineering staff and a much longer build time. The also-ran services were astronomically more expensive.

What other advice do I have?

It's a great tool for monitoring infrastructure and application performance. The only drawbacks have been cost and a few issues with outages and monitoring/alerting failures.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.