We have service in multiple countries, so the monitoring and alerts are valuable features for us.
Given that the size of the team is small and we have one infrastructure engineer, it’s good that we constantly get alerts if something is going wrong somewhere. You see the spikes. Since we are a small team, one person can set up alerts for three instances, and other instances in UAT, test, and QA environment.
First of all, it tells us loopholes in our system. The whole error-reporting thing lets us identify problems faster so we can take corrective action sooner. We can think about performance of certain code that’s been written, so we can take preventative actions.
They’re adding analytics, geo analytics, more mobile app monitoring. They have the data explorer – all those features will really help.
In the last year I’ve never seen APM go down.
APM was already in production when I joined the company.
I think we also looked at one or two. The first one we tried was New Relic. The reputation of the vendor – we decided to give New Relic a try after hearing about how it was used to fix the Affordable Care Act implementation. That’s how we heard about New Relic. We needed to set up monitoring and alert – when we saw New Relic we liked it and its ease of setup. We gave it a 30-day trial, and after that there was no looking back.
The error analytics thing – we always wanted that. This is something that is coming up in December. Geoanalytics will be super helpful. There’s always room for improvement, and they’re still getting there coming up with new ideas to make it super comfortable.
If they don’t want to build something on their own (and it all depends on company size, resources, etc.), an APM solution is the right answer. Given we have only one infrastructure guy and he can manage all of this, and a small team, everyone can use it all for different purposes. Stress testing, load testing, and evaluating performance. Each team has different ideas about how to use the reports, so it’s good for everybody. Different skillset people can use the entire NR suite for different reasons. It’s the whole package.