Our primary use case is for application performance management (APM. We use New Relic to monitor API performance on the servers. It is a safety monitor for the performance.
Product Manager at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Enables you to configure your own dashboard to monitor specific parameters
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of New Relic APM is the dashboard, New Relic Insights. I configured my own dashboard to monitor certain parameters."
- "I would like to see the company implement the AI auto-baseline feature which Dynatrace has."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
New Relic is now the leader in efficiency improvement. We are able to configure our own specific dashboards so that we can monitor the things which we want to monitor.
Some of the parameters in our deployment, which we already know and we want to monitor constantly, can be selected on our own custom dashboard.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of New Relic APM is the dashboard, New Relic Insights. I configured my own dashboard to monitor certain parameters.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see the company implement the AI auto-baseline feature which Dynatrace has.
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January 2025
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For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
New Relic APM is more stable than Dynatrace. I don't have to upgrade that often. I'll need to upgrade Dynatrece after every few months for any of the new releases.
Sometimes, with Dynatrece after an upgrade to the new release, i.e. if I need to upgrade every half a year, it's not compatible or it has some compatibility issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I don't have any issues with the scalability of either New Relic or Dynatrace. They are both quite scalable.
How are customer service and support?
New Relic doesn't have any offices in my country, so most of the time we have to use the web for resources or phone support for customer service.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
New Relic APM was recommended by another vendor to our company. The software platform features and the local support of the agency were included in the package.
Those two factors sold us on New Relic APM as a solution.
How was the initial setup?
New Relic APM installation is quite easy and very straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing is better with New Relic APM than Dynatrace.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I recommend evaluating both New Relic APM and Dynatrace to see which features benefit your company specifically. Dynatrace is easier for getting started with no experience.
If you are a very experienced user and have intimate knowledge of your network architecture, then choose New Relic APM over Dynatrace.
What other advice do I have?
The reason we chose New Relic is the pricing. I will rate New Relic APM an eight out of ten for review. Overall, New Relic is not as good as Dynatrace.
I have to understand my own system and I like the New Relic APM dashboard. The software could be faster and more automated.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Software Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
With the client JS API, we can report data to it and query it with Insights.
Valuable Features:
It helps us organize the data from our clients and reason with it. Moreover, with the client JS API, we can report data to New Relic and query it with Insights. It is easy to use and has an understandable graph editor.
This is the real deal.
Improvements to My Organization:
Tracking and monitoring production is mandatory, however, we did it for years only for the back-end side. As the client-side applications grow bigger and get more complex more responsibility gets to the client. Because of that we must be able to understand if our clients are "healthy". The term "healthy" is not clear to what it means.
Presently we report data to New Relic Insights, and we've built some really readable and understandable graphs. We monitor with those graphs every deploy to production, and we are advising the graphs to resolve current problems with our application, like errors and problems with the load and response times.
Room for Improvement:
New Relic comes with some features out of the box, but not enough. There are some essential features that New Relic needs to implement that their competitors already support, like special treatment for AngularJS/React applications. We had to implement (with the JS API) the ability to query errors through Insights which is essential. Currently, we don't have a way to send alerts which is a real pain.
Use of Solution:
We are using it in conjunction with APM and Insights.
Deployment Issues:
We've had no issues with deployment.
Stability Issues:
We've had no issues with stability.
Scalability Issues:
We've had no issues with scalability.
Other Solutions Considered:
We also looked at Raygun.io and TrackJs which are great products, but neither has the tri-factor, which is:
- Tracking errors with integration to the server
- Ability to report you own data
- Ability to build you own custom dashboard
Other Advice:
New Relic has a good separation between the data that you report and how you show it, along with data you get out of the box. My advice is about how to show the data in a way that it will be easy to reason with it.
You can build many different graphs, really try them all, and then decide what fits best for your organization. That's what we did. The way you handle data varies between organizations and even between teams in a organization, and the ability to show the data in different ways is very helpful with that.
New Relic always gets new things done. The system is always changing and in a good way. New features are always coming into the system and we are very happy with it.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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New Relic
January 2025
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Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 51-200 employees
It provides us with less debugging response time and alert notifications, although I wish it had more insight into what might be causing a particular slowness issue.
What is most valuable?
It shows you what’s going on, but we had to do custom instrumentation ourselves.
How has it helped my organization?
- Debugging response time is less
- Alert notifications and alert summaries
What needs improvement?
- I wish it had more insight into what might be causing a particular slowness issue. It finds the function, but it would be great to have insight into what’s slow.
- More instrumentation.
- Also, it would be good to compare machine state to machine state (compare versions of UNIX, Ruby, and libraries) and be able to perform auditing of machines.
How are customer service and technical support?
Never needed it.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The decision was why not to have it (cost?) not why to have it.
What other advice do I have?
New Relic is great for DevOps and for a company that expects developers to do their own operations. For specialists they tend to have their own instrumentation tools.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
IT Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
It gives us enough knowledge to know where to improve things on the database side, although sometimes it requires too much drilling down to find out about a problem.
Valuable Features
It gives us insight into several areas--
- Where slowdowns are,
- Which of our customers is hitting us most, and
- If there’s an application issue on the database side, how long a query takes.
Improvements to My Organization
It gives us enough knowledge to know where to improve things on the database side, or to make improvements in the application logic.
Room for Improvement
I don't have any suggestions for improvements, but we think sometimes it’s too difficult to get more details about a problem. Sometimes it requires too much drilling down to find out about a problem for which we shouldn't need to do so much searching.
Deployment Issues
No problems whatsoever with deploying APM.
Stability Issues
It seems pretty stable, although there are times when it is not available.
Scalability Issues
Seems to be pretty good on scalability and it’s easy to install into our applications.
Customer Service and Technical Support
We haven’t had any issues needing to involve their technical support.
Initial Setup
It was already in the environment when I joined, but I can't imagine that setup would have been anything but straightforward.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Head of Data Center at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Great monitoring product. Potential privacy and security issues but the cons might just be too tempting not to try it..
Valuable Features:
New Relic has proven itself as a very reliable and convenient way to monitor your servers and applications. Compared to other cloud-based offerings, New Relic is easy to install and provides a lot of information to you in a very convenient and easy to understand dashboard.I chose to test drive New Relic after seeing the graphs from a fellow sysad. I was amazed at the level of information and detail that I saw that I decided to try it out myself. What's even more impressive is that you can share monitoring servers or apps with other members of New Relic. Notifications are also available via email, and all of the notifications for my servers and services arrive on time. This allows me to immediately check what is happening and take appropriate action if necessary.
Room for Improvement:
One major issue for me with New Relic is data privacy. Though installation is a breeze for most operating systems, the thought of installing a monitoring application and seeing a lot of information about my servers or applications somewhere is somewhat nerve-wracking. Right now, I do not know what other information is being sent to New Relic's servers and I don't have any control as to what is being monitored and sent. This can be a major issue for some companies, and care must be taken is there is no settings page presented during installation to enable or disable certain parameters for monitoring.Overall, New Relic is a great product is recommended for use. Just make sure that you understand the potential privacy and data theft issues associated with cloud-based services.
Other Advice:
Personally, I would like to have an options pages during installation detailing what can be monitored and allow me to only select certain parameters to be reported. Also, network usage of the tool should also be profiled as it might consume a significant amount of your bandwidth if you have many servers being monitored.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
DevOps Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
It's helped with a lot of troubleshooting of performance issues and with code problems, where we deploy something and it's performing slowly.
Valuable Features:
The most valuable feature for us is the ability to see what is going on with the apps on our web server. We can monitor the response times, throughput, what transactions are fast or slow, and what's being hit more than others.
Improvements to My Organization:
In the past, we had to look at server metrics such as CPU and the number of connections. With APM, we can see much more about what it's doing. It's helped with a lot of troubleshooting of performance issues. It's also helped with code problems, where we deploy something and it's performing slowly. It helps us see the problem in the web app, database, rendering, etc.
Deployment Issues:
We've had no issues with deployment.
Stability Issues:
We encountered no issues with instability.
Scalability Issues:
It scaled well, as we just need to add a new agent onto the box when we add a server. Also, it's been helpful in determining when we need to scale up by looking at the metrics.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
DevOps Engineer at Cvent
I can drill down and see what’s happening in real-time, but I'd like second-by-second monitoring, instead of a five-minute lag time.
Valuable Features
Real-time error monitoring means I can drill down and see what’s happening. It allows me to see what my latency is while it’s going on.
Improvements to My Organization
The data visualization is easy to read. Better yet, it's easy to show other people the visualizations.
Room for Improvement
I'd like second-by-second monitoring, instead of a five-minute lag time.
Stability Issues
It's good, though there was just one instance where the agent had a problem, but it was quick to remedy.
Scalability Issues
No issues encountered with scalability.
Customer Service and Technical Support
I found a bug and they gave us a work around, and a week later, they released a patch.
Initial Setup
I wasn't involved in the initial setup.
Other Advice
I would like to see the platform extended further.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Drew - have you tried AppInternals? It offers user-to-backend transaction tracing and second-by-second performance monitoring. Try it for free here: www.appinternals.com
Developer, DevOps Team at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We can see easily what’s working and not, so there’s less downtime, but some training and documentation from them would be nice.
Valuable Features:
Dashboards let us monitor applications. We can see exactly what the problem is and where we need to go to troubleshoot it to solve the problem. Most of the time it tells us what the problem is. When you see it up in the application you put it exactly where you need it; we can troubleshoot simply by looking.
Improvements to My Organization:
If something goes bad, we can resolve it faster and in the proper way, rather than spending a lot of time just trying to understand what’s going on. We can see easily what’s working and not, so there’s less downtime.
Room for Improvement:
It’s really powerful with a lot of features, but some training and documentation from New Relic would be useful.
Stability Issues:
We had some problems at the beginning, but we may not have set it up properly. It’s not clear if it was stability problem in New Relic or in our application, and it was just at the beginning.
Scalability Issues:
Our stack is fixed, so we only scale within the set number of servers.
Initial Setup:
I wasn’t on the implementation team.
Other Advice:
Sometimes we just don’t know how to maximize the use of its features. If we had some additional training, that would help.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Updated: January 2025
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I also liked the Dynatrace feature. I have noticed that NetScout has added the same mathematics for predictive and baseline and also anomaly detection for volume and number of transactions and transaction types like GET or PUT or whatever for HTTP and similar for databases and so on and so forth. I don't know how far reaching it is though.