Application monitoring. The fact that we can trace a request through all the layers of the application (gateway-app server-database (persistent and caching layers)) and trace all the steps in between, is invaluable to us!
Managing Director/CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It helps us monitor our performance by giving us clear unobtrusive insights with weighted numbers, and although it integrates with Docker, it's missing a few minor metrics.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
We can monitor our performance easily using the metrics, Apex, that New Relic have devised. This is a weighted number (0 to 1) which gives us a clear unobtrusive insight into our performance. Therefore, by leveraging the API, we can integrate the current performance metrics of our entire stack into our wall-boards and internal reporting.
What needs improvement?
With the recent introduction of Docker integration we're seeing increased metric collection, but are also missing a few minor metrics and deployment setups.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using it for over five years now.
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
In a regular and normal usage, deploying the agent (either PHP, NodeJS or the server agent) is very simple and intuitive. We do however run into issues integrating the PHP agent into the Dokku deployments, but we have been working with the Dokku/Heroku/New Relic support staff to fix this.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is fairly stable. There have been issues in the past where stability was not fully reliable, but all problems were quickly resolved and we personally haven't had any data loss issues of any kind.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't seen any issue that affect us personally.
How are customer service and support?
Customer Service:
It's a big 10/10. The engagement of the customer service either via tickets or the public forum is excellent.
Technical Support:After building our initial integration with our framework several years ago the technical support engineer provided us with great insight and it really was a two way street of communication: we provided ideas that were implemented and they also gave us insight into optimal integration points.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We've tried various other tools over the years, but after giving New Relic a try, we haven't looked back.
How was the initial setup?
The initial set-up was at the time the most straightforward and easy as imaginable. This really pushed us over the edge of giving it a go and loving it from day one.
What about the implementation team?
We did it ourselves, and it's easy.
What was our ROI?
Since it's an application monitoring platform the actual ROI is a lot harder to calculate than other services directly related to the business. We do however see an increased focus on performance and therefore have a good ROI. It's also due to the fact that there are ways to keep the costs of New Relic down and still have the benefits.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Just try it out and install it on a couple of systems. You could go "all in" and have the full license and instalment on everything, but certainly during start-up, you could leverage a couple of instalments and still have insights, if it's installed into core parts of your set-up
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Can't remember which platforms were out there. Soon after we started with New Relic, AppDynamics went live, and much later Server Density added APM. They both seem like worth competitors, but as previously mentioned: we have no reason to switch yet.
What other advice do I have?
Just give it a go and see how it goes.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
CEO at Carousel Apps
The performance report on which controllers are taking the longest and which parts of the application are consuming the most resources are valuable.
What is most valuable?
At the moment, I think the aspect of their product is the most useful to us: server monitoring. We actually display the status of our servers continually in our dashboard (using https://Screensaver.Ninja) because that's a critical aspect of our operation. This is only true because our most used product is not gaining new features as we are re-writing it from scratch, but while we were developing new features, their performance report on which controllers are taking the longest and which parts of the application are consuming the most resources is incredibly useful.
How has it helped my organization?
Very simple, using server monitoring. I saw over a period of time our disk usage increase until some servers went into yellow alert (above 70%). Then we started working on this issue without a rush because we knew we had time, and instead of increasing the size of our servers and thus having extra cost, we managed to find how to reduce our storage footprint to fit within our current servers. Constantly seeing the green status of all my servers makes me sleep well at night.
What needs improvement?
I think their dev packages for server monitoring could handle configuration a bit better. We install upgrades and patches every day and their packages seems to require manual intervention due to the configuration file more often than other packages. Since we use Puppet, it's trivial for us to deal with it, but sometimes we do have to look at the configuration file to figure out whether something really changed or not. To be fair, this hasn't happened in a while, so maybe they improved it already.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used it for five years over multiple projects in multiple companies.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No issues encountered.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No issues encountered.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No issues encountered.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
I don't think I ever needed it, no.
Technical Support:I don't think I ever needed it, no.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I don't think New Relic has a lot of competition. We also use Linode to monitor our servers (but not our app).
How was the initial setup?
I think this is one of the aspects in which New Relic shines. They designed the product to be easy to install and integrate, it's part of their guiding philosophy and probably what made me try it in the first place.
What about the implementation team?
I implemented it myself.
What was our ROI?
We are happy with the free version, so I never properly evaluated this.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
New Relic is not cheap, but I have a few colleagues that need the paid accounts, and although it hurts, generally not having New Relic hurts more.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Not really.
What other advice do I have?
Just go ahead and try it.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Director of Corporate and Software Development at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
It gives us instant feedback on incidences causing the biggest performance hits. However, alerts for alerting the appropriate people when something goes wrong are not quite there yet.
What is most valuable?
I think the downtime alerts as well as the insight into performance killers from database queries are the most valuable feature for us.
How has it helped my organization?
I think that we didn’t have much insight into which things were causing the biggest performance hits, so it gave us instant feedback on incidents which may have caused users enough pain.
What needs improvement?
They have integrated alert and performance monitoring which they’re rolling out as a beta now. A lot of the features for application monitoring and uptime, and alerts for alerting the appropriate people when something goes wrong are not quite there yet.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We’ve never had any problems whatsoever.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It’s been useful as we’ve grown our user base; we haven’t had any scalability issues. We’ve done tens of thousands rather than tens of millions of transactions.
How are customer service and technical support?
I’ve only used it a couple of times. They escalated the issues appropriately and it always seemed like someone who understood the issue jumped on the ticket, and we’ve had the issued resolved in a timely fashion.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were previously using nothing else. We were reading through logs trying to interpret our own data, which was challenging. Someone suggested New Relic and we went with it right after; they’re the only player in town for this sort of environment.
How was the initial setup?
The initial ground level setup was very easy, very intuitive, and went very quickly. Some of the more advanced features did require a lot of review of their documentation and a few support tickets to figure out.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I think documentation is probably key for us, and then support. Reputation and long-term relationship doesn’t matter so much if they have a good product. For this product we didn’t really have a viable alternative. We couldn’t find anybody else who did something similar.
What other advice do I have?
We’re very satisfied with it. We had a little difficulty plugging in some more of the advanced features. It’s so big and so complex, but New Relic does invest in education.
This is the best tool for gaining insight into SaaS or cloud-based applications that we’ve seen. Unless you’re going to roll your own solution, you pretty much have to use them.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Lead Developer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It allows us to determine when and what we need to scale, instead of just chucking machines at layers and hoping it’s right. It would be nice, though, to have more granularity for metrics displayed.
What is most valuable?
I’ve gotten our teams to use New Relic to help them craft code that properly performs right out of the gate. It complements our user-acceptance testing where we can put in performance testing right away.
We also have better transparency, we can see bottleneck in resources (need more memory, CPU, etc.), we can catch problems such as full disks before they crash our server. We never had that type of insight before. It makes our Ops teams’ lives easy because they just get emails as to potential issues.
How has it helped my organization?
It gives us the ability to determine when and what we need to scale, instead of just chucking machines at layers and hoping it’s right. It all goes towards giving our customers the best experience possible.
What needs improvement?
When you look at disk monitoring, it would be cool to see which folders are gobbling most space, so that when we get a full-disk alert, we can go into our servers to purge that without downloading a separate tool to see what’s contending for hard disk space.
Also, it's really well put together, but it would be nice to have more granularity for metrics displayed so that ops team can see more holistically what’s happening.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There are no stability problems. There have been slow points where data loads slowly, but it can be solved just by clicking refresh. No problems with agents crashing or not reporting data. So no reason for me to worry about its stability.
I never have to worry about not collecting data, but probably the web portion might need a little bit of work.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It’s scaled to all our needs. We have apps for on-site and in-cloud, and it’s worked well for both. There’s no problem with scalability.
How are customer service and technical support?
We haven’t had to reach out yet, and hopefully things keep going smoothly.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I was involved for another account, but it was very straightforward, couldn’t possibly be simpler. So easy.
What other advice do I have?
We looked at the ease of installation, how easy it is to get it put and running to see what’s happening on your machine.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Software Engineer Team Lead at THE ICONIC
We have custom insights dashboards – massive screens with all this information aggregated. There were some CSS issues where sometimes the CSS wasn’t rendering, but they seem to have overcome those.
Valuable Features
Debugging tools, as we’re huge on this. Being able to drill down into what’s actually going on with our stack, being able to see the performance issues, where our bottlenecks are.
We do continuous deployment and delivery. One of the things that’s useful is to be able to detect when we deploy bugs and issues into the live platform – error reports are hugely useful.
Throughput, apex, those kinds of things, so we can always see what’s going on. The New Relic Browser also gives us the front-end reporting, versus APM on the back-end.
Improvements to My Organization
Speed to issue resolution – making sure our stack is healthy. If someone reports an issue we’ll always go to New Relic first; that’s where it becomes a good product in and of itself. It gives us all the information we need in one place.
We have custom insights dashboards – massive screens with all this information aggregated.
Stability Issues
A few issues in the past; there were some CSS issues where sometimes the CSS wasn’t rendering, but they seem to have overcome those. I’ve never experienced downtime which is impressive.
Scalability Issues
We use the APM scalability tools; more so in the past. Now we’re in the cloud we can see how the stack performs. We use some of the graphing to see at what point we’ll hit bottlenecks, and the in-depth reporting to identify weak points.
Customer Service and Technical Support
We’ve used it a couple of times. They’re great. They follow up with us as well, which is nice and quite unusual.
Initial Setup
It was already in production, but I have done it in the past elsewhere. It’s so straightforward it’s ridiculous.
Other Advice
I like the solution so much I haven’t necessarily tried other products and don’t need or want to. Ask if the solution has the main features your stack needs. Does it support your languages, frameworks?
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Technical Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Our end users are getting a better experience with our software as we're able to respond faster to any incidences. We could use, however, better ability to drill-down into errors.
What is most valuable?
I like the integration with PagerDuty, so that helps spread out our on-call schedule. Application performance helps us drill down on the bottlenecks in our applications, to save us a lot of development time.
How has it helped my organization?
The real benefits are for end users. They’re getting a better experience with our software. It allows us to respond faster to any incidences.
What needs improvement?
- Better error reporting
- Better ability to drill-down into errors
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No problem at all.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's absolutely great.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No problem at all.
How are customer service and technical support?
They were fine. I spoke to a developer from the mobile team and he answered the question on the first attempt.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This is our first APM. We were looking for a solution that helped us to improve our customer experience. It was borne out of database issues we were having at the time. We had no APM solution prior – it was all done manually.
How was the initial setup?
Straightforward. It would have been better to have more transparency to understand how New Relic actually slots onto your page, how it fits into your application.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We also looked at AppDynamics. New Relic felt like a better solution and the data that came out during the trial was better.
What other advice do I have?
Breadth of features, user experience, and constant development of the platform, as well as the value it’s adding to our business. Our products have grown with the New Relic platform; we see the value that people are getting from the platform. The data pretty much speak for itself – sign up, get a trial, and use it in production immediately.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Director of Operations at Trulia
We can share root cause of issues with developers and other people within engineering because we can drill down in parallel.
What is most valuable?
- Ease of installation
- Ease of use
- It provides a common platform for Dev and Ops to be able to pinpoint and communicate problems
- The solution allows us to quickly pinpoint problems
- There’s good integration between all the products in the suite – browser and some of the plugins
How has it helped my organization?
Being able to quickly figure out the root causes of issues. It also makes it very easy to share that information with developers and other people within engineering – we can drill down in parallel.
What needs improvement?
There are a number of plugins that New Relic makes. It would be nice to be able to instantly integrate that with APM. Right now, they’re in their own little area, so it’s not as easy to quickly dive into a problem, for example in PHP. It’s a little hard to get data on the back end.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability and uptime have been great. They do a great job in notifying of maintenance windows. We have had some graph inconsistencies which might represent a quirk in the solution, but we haven’t seen that in a while.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It’s a very scalable solution. We have it on maybe a couple of hundred hosts today. We use an automation tool, Puppet, so we’re able to quickly install the New Relic agent across classes of servers easily. On their end as well, they’re collecting more data, so it seems like they’re scaling out very well too. There are no performance issues with scale.
How are customer service and technical support?
Actually we haven’t had to use it yet.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to New Relic, we did not have an APM solution. We had a lot of home-built tools but nothing like this with dashboards. Mainly the maintenance of the home-built tools was difficult. It was tribal knowledge with no documentation, so we were constrained by the engineers and their specific knowledge of the tools.
How was the initial setup?
Very straightforward – it was great that everything was packaged so we didn’t have to do too much customization. We changed maybe two lines in the config. The documentation was very straightforward. Once we installed it a couple of times manually, we were able to script it, which was very easy as well.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There weren’t really any contenders – it was go with our home grown solution or this. Initially the product effectiveness was the top of the list. Cost is a consideration. Really cost was secondary to whether the tool actually worked and delivered value. Support wasn’t high on the list but it was a consideration. Mainly the ease of use and product effectiveness are the two main considerations.
What other advice do I have?
It’s a solid product. They continue to innovate year after year. They’re getting closer to a 10, but because of the speed of innovation I think there are a few disconnects within the suite/product line. That’s the main thing that keep sit from being a perfect solution, but they’re a very solid product and a very solid company.
It needs to be a cross-organizational evaluation. Can’t be Dev or Ops-only. The solution definitely needs to be low friction to get it into the environment. Being open to the customers in terms of what their product roadmap is and what the customer can expect, and then getting feedback from the customer to help them along as well is important.
Reviews are important. A lot of times other companies are trying to solve similar problems. People are going to be trying competitive solutions, so getting feedback is important to the vetting process.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Advisor-Product Consultant at Bachat
An analytics-oriented solution that is both stable and scalable, packed with a diverse range of features
Pros and Cons
- "The versatility of the solution is its most valuable feature."
- "The initial setup can be made easier. Like Mixpanel, New Relic can also have a step-by-step guide for the setup process."
What is our primary use case?
We use New Relic to generate log management, like the different kinds of logs and alarms, and automate the same easily.
What is most valuable?
The versatility of the solution is its most valuable feature. It offers features like user behavior and user experience monitoring besides log management in one suite. When comparing it with other tools, other tools are primarily focused on only the management or only user behavior, but New Relic has both features.
What needs improvement?
The initial setup can be made easier. Like Mixpanel, New Relic can also have a step-by-step guide for the setup process. It needs slight improvements to be made in the user experience.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using New Relic for two to three months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution. I rate it eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a scalable solution. I rate it eight out of ten.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was simple, but it can be made easier. I rate it seven out of ten. I did not deploy it a hundred percent because I was testing it out. The solution was deployed on the cloud.
What other advice do I have?
I will recommend the solution, especially for a large product. So that one can have complete monitoring from the front-end tool and back-end server side.
I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Updated: November 2024
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