New Relic APM, Logs + Infrastructure Monitoring (PAYG with Free Tier)

What do you like best about the product?

As a boots-on-the-ground feature developer, I find NewRelic very helpful for diagnosing issues, pinpointing their exact causes, and resolving them ASAP.

The application traces help you to pinpoint exactly where you need to be looking in your code, rather than fumbling around with complex logs or arcane error messages.

What do you dislike about the product?

NewRelic is a massive platform, and its interface can be a bit overwhelming. I also think the search functionality is a bit limited – you can only search on certain attributes, and sometimes they aren't what you expect.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

New Relic is my main tool for helping to debug production issues with our code.

I used New Relic  for instrumenting logs and designing different dashboards for a telecommunication company. During iPhone launches, I monitored all orders, how many orders were sold, what iPhone models had been sold, and the quantities. I used New Relic  to keep the status of all of this information, and I also used New Relic for synthetic monitoring.

New Relic provides a really good dashboard and view, allowing me to filter by different options and different New Relic models. Everything shows how one system connects to another, how orders go to logistics, and delivery on the same screen, which really stood out to me. For synthetic monitoring, I used different APIs, both scripted and browser-based, and monitored them. Whenever any API goes down, I get notified instantly, which is a great feature.

I use New Relic for webhooks, setting up notifications using webhooks and getting notified in the Teams channel directly.

Synthetic monitoring and reactive monitoring are the best features that I found in New Relic. Using a simple Node.js script, I can monitor different APIs in production every one minute, two minutes, or five minutes. I don't have to monitor reactively but proactively, and the agent makes a call to my API every five minutes, allowing me to know when my API is down and helping with production downtime.

Proactive monitoring definitely impacts my team's workflow and production reliability. There was an instance when we had a very critical API that I monitored using proactive monitoring and synthetic monitoring, and it went down for a few minutes. I got notified in my Outlook, so I notified the dedicated team for that, and they fixed the issue even before the customer noticed, saving us a lot.

New Relic has positively impacted my organization by helping with our observability goals. We had 20-25 goals to have observability in place, and New Relic was a great tool to achieve that goal through creating dashboards, setting up synthetic monitoring, and different kinds of alerts. New Relic helped us achieve those observability goals by significantly saving downtime. Whenever an API is down, we get notified instantly and take actions, which saves us from downtime, and alerts definitely help us to take action quicker, even before the real customer notices any issues.

New Relic can be improved in a few areas. I noticed that some things can be easily done through Splunk but not through New Relic. For example, creating dashboards in Splunk allows you to instrument different kinds of data and API logs and scrape the data to create a dashboard. For New Relic, you have to use different accounts, so when tracing any API call, you have to move from one system to another, which are all in different accounts. You would need different account access to see end-to-end tracing, whereas in Splunk, you can see everything in one place.

I used New Relic in my previous job for about a year.

New Relic is stable.

New Relic's scalability is good.

The customer support for New Relic is good. I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as a nine.

Positive

We previously used Splunk and needed to explore New Relic for synthetic monitoring, so we moved to New Relic.

We did not purchase New Relic through the AWS Marketplace .

I have seen a return on investment, specifically in terms of time saved.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for synthetic monitoring is that minions used to cost a lot and we cannot set an unlimited number of synthetic monitoring.

Before choosing New Relic, we evaluated OpenTelemetry , but we don't have the skills for using OpenTelemetry .

New Relic is a good tool that you should utilize for monitoring your front end, back end, and different APIs. If you have any critical APIs like payment, which you cannot afford to go down, you can definitely use synthetic monitoring to monitor it and get notified in your Teams channel, Outlook, or mail. I would rate this product an eight overall.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )

My main use case for New Relic  is monitoring the app performances from dashboards and tracing the API calls. For app performance, I monitor the four golden signals, the throughput, error rate, and the Apdex score. For tracing, I try to find out where there is latency and from which source the latency is coming, whether it is the network or the database call.

The best features New Relic  offers are end-to-end tracing of any calls and custom dashboards. Those features stand out for me in my daily work because, as an SRE and DevOps engineer, when I need to debug or find the root cause, especially when multiple teams are involved, end-to-end tracing is useful to identify the correct team and engage them further. Custom dashboards are useful to showcase high-level metrics to the leadership.

In multiple cases, I use New Relic to debug and find the root cause, especially where network calls are involved. It is also useful for alerting when the throughput is dropping or the error rate is spiking. Time is saved in debugging and finding root causes.

New Relic can be improved by providing auto-completion of New Relic Query Language queries. Custom dashboards may have more templates so that I can drag and drop and create my own monitoring dashboards.

I chose a rating of 8 out of 10 because the UI requires me to dig in and find the needed traces, and it can be more user-friendly.

I have been using New Relic for more than seven years.

New Relic is stable.

New Relic's scalability is good, and I can scale easily using the agents installed in my infrastructure.

The customer support for New Relic is excellent.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution.

I have a long-standing relationship with New Relic, so dedicated sales teams engage with my leadership team and we finalize the costs.

Before choosing New Relic, I evaluated other options, specifically Datadog  and Splunk.

At the team level, New Relic is a good observability tool. My advice for others looking into using New Relic is that it is a great tool for monitoring your application, querying your logs, and visualizing various parameters. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for New Relic  is monitoring performance. I use it to check the logs for any failure in applications, as well as checking the CPU and memory usage.

A quick, specific example of how I've used New Relic  to solve an issue is with our SaaS applications. Sometimes an issue arises, and I need to look into our applications in the portal to see the errors. For instance, we have encountered an internal server error that prevents our applications from running. I then click on the errors to see more details and check the logs, including timestamps when the issue occurred. Recently, New Relic launched Log Patterns, enabling me to see different errors with patterns such as an error occurring 17 times in the last 15 minutes. I can use these attributes to filter by account services and agent names for infrastructure issues, allowing me to identify and fix the errors.

New Relic helps my team by getting alerts for high CPU usage. I need to check which server it is happening on. After identifying the server, I log in, go to the task manager, and kill the particular process that consumes excessive memory. This action results in the CPU usage coming down, and due to New Relic's alert, I effectively resolve issues, ensuring our application runs smoothly.

In my opinion, the best feature that New Relic offers is Log Patterns, as it efficiently fetches logs for each failure I encounter. This feature has proven to be extremely useful for me.

The Log Patterns feature helps me in my day-to-day work by identifying the number of times a particular issue reoccurs over a specified period, informing me of its frequency during that timeframe.

I would mention that I can use various filters in New Relic, such as filtering by infrastructure, host name, and server names. Filtration is an incredibly useful feature in New Relic as well.

New Relic has positively impacted my organization by making it easier to catch failures so I can resolve them quickly and take action. Previously, I did not receive notifications, and a person had to check constantly. Now New Relic manages this and alerts me to any issues, allowing me to take necessary actions and preserve my SLAs.

A specific outcome showing how New Relic helped my team is that downtime has decreased by around 15 to 20 percent in my current organization while using New Relic.

New Relic can be improved, particularly by enhancing the UI, which is currently a bit off. Making it more attractive and interactive for customers, similar to Grafana 's UI, would be beneficial.

I have been using New Relic for around three years.

New Relic is stable in my experience.

The scalability of New Relic is really nice.

The customer support for New Relic is really good. Whenever I reach out to them, they are helpful.

I have used Grafana  before New Relic in my previous organization. In my current organization, I only use New Relic.

I do not believe our organization evaluated other options before choosing New Relic. My director, who uses New Relic in another project, is impressed with this tool, so we likely opted for it because of that recommendation.

My advice for others looking into using New Relic is that it is a really useful tool. Before starting to use it, you should refer to its user guidance documents, as they are systematically created and truly helpful. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )