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

Positive

We mostly used to do creation of dashboards and creating alerts as per the conditions and setting up some NRQL queries, or New Relic  Query Language, to make different kinds of conditions and policies to receive alerts whenever we receive any error or spike in request time, response time, etc.

New Relic 's NRQL query language is what I appreciate most because it is similar to SQL queries. We are able to check the exact timestamps whenever we need to find the logs and can find out proper errors without any complication in the queries. Secondly, their alerts and condition settings are valuable because there are direct links and direct openings for alerts and condition entities where we can check whatever alerts we created. We can check the conditions and understand how this alert got triggered. Additionally, I appreciate the dashboard view, where we can create whatever dashboards we needed.

New Relic must be integrated with real multiple platforms. For example, Elasticsearch has some capabilities where you can collaborate it properly with AWS  services also, similar to how CloudWatch works. There are some differentiations between CloudWatch and New Relic—CloudWatch does not have the dashboard, but New Relic does. CloudWatch does not provide proper logs, but New Relic can provide them. However, I need New Relic to have a real direct connection with any type of cloud that an organization uses. We can do this with Prometheus and Grafana , so I was looking for the same integration with New Relic as well.

New Relic can do better with integration with the multiple clouds. This is not happening right now properly, or it might be my organization is not using it correctly. But right now there is no such kind of proper integration directly with the cloud services so we are able to fetch the real-time logs at the same time.

Additionally, it was a little expensive for my organization because at the time of review, I tried to connect with the marketing team. They told me that it is a real, real a little bit expensive as per the data ingestion and usage. Furthermore, alert policies sometimes take time for new users to understand. Some of the things in NRQL—because I am using it for more than five years, I am very familiar with it—but for new users who are new to New Relic, there is a little difficulty with that.

I have been using New Relic for more than five years in my career.

Sometimes it works real slow, but I think it depends on the organization to organization usage. Because we mostly use it for organizational purposes rather than for personal work, but to be honest, the experience of New Relic is a little slow as compared to the other applications. New Relic lags sometimes. It has not crashed in my work experience.

Adding more stuff into New Relic to handle is not an issue. New Relic is highly scalable and its build quality is very easy for handling to startup, enterprise, scale up, and workloads. It is also suitable for cloud native architectures, SaaS, or software as a service, and for high volume data ingestion also. NRQL is also very quite easy for scaling. If we need to query huge data efficiently using NRQL language, we are able to filter it by the exact timestamps and pod information as well as post region, versions, and services. New Relic is highly scalable compared to the other applications.

To be honest, till now we did not get any such kind of big outage which makes us directly contact to the customer care support team. What happened in my scenario was about two to three years ago when I was working for the application support, and we needed some kind of thing where actually my teammate was trying to ask a new thing to add in New Relic. He needed support, and he did not face any kind of issue. Over the call bridge he made, there was no such kind of issue. They are very polite and helped him out.

Positive

I basically tried to use Site24x7, which is quite good. And Amazon CloudWatch  also. Because Site24x7 gives us mostly full monitoring for the applications, infra, and other network kind of things. And it is a little simpler setup as compared to New Relic. And for CloudWatch, it is a part of Amazon AWS  web services. So it gives us AWS native monitoring for logs and metrics and the alarms.

I prefer most of the time New Relic, but sometimes if New Relic goes kind of slow or laggy, instead of that, sometimes I use AWS CloudWatch, to be honest.

I just wanted to mention that if I don't have to go for the CloudWatch because sometimes we are not able to fetch the logs properly at the particular period of time and sometimes as per the new users also, if they are not able to share this log or the specific timestamp they need. So I go further with the Prometheus and Grafana  because they are cloud native systems, plus they include the excellence with the Kubernetes .

When we did deployment a long time ago, there was no such kind of issue with New Relic at that time of deployment because we were easily able to set it up. If we want logs and trace enablement, it is really very easy, and the same applies to log forwarding also, creating a dashboard or we need a default dashboard also.

We mostly do this with one person, but in the shadow we need only one person to guide them or if anybody needs a support. It depends on the type of deployment, meaning how much things you have to deploy. Sometimes if it is going to take a real big time, so we require to take a shadow support for us. One person can do it easily.

New Relic is quite good, not so much fast, but quite good. Overall for everything, I would rate this product a nine. My overall review rating for this product is 9.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

I really like the synthetic monitoring functionality within New Relic. It mimics human interactions as if a person is logging in, and we can deploy scripts that work on time windows, either from private or public locations. I also love how easy it is to set up with straightforward New Relic documentation that's in easy-to-read and understand language. This helps a lot with installing agents for our applications and integrating with Azure workloads, making it really seamless to get data from Azure into New Relic. Moreover, New Relic is a unified observability solution that shows me every small detail about my application, from memory usage to throughput and response times, giving all the insights and metrics I need.

What do you dislike about the product?

Not really anything that I dislike about NR, it really does it's job very impressively.

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

New Relic solves every problem related to understanding what my applications are facing or will face. It shows small details like memory usage, throughput, and API response times, providing unified observability and insights into application metrics. It really helps our team as well we have created custom dashboards for our team using NRQL queries and it really helps my team to get insights.

What do you like best about the product?

new relic has ease of use and implementation

What do you dislike about the product?

The main downside is the pricing and cost predictability. As data ingestion grows, especially with logs and custom metrics, costs can increase quickly and are not always easy to forecast.

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

New Relic helps us solve the problem of limited visibility across distributed systems. Earlier, we had to rely on multiple tools to understand application performance, infrastructure health, and logs, which made troubleshooting slow and reactive.

Our day-to-day use case is to look at our application performance and our overall Apdex scores, and we do take care of our page load times and we look at overall trends of traffic spikes, our page visits, and what not. We monitor our CPU utilization and our performance of our new components and page time loads, and we take these graphs seriously and we act accordingly. We monitor a lot of other important key metrics from New Relic , including our error rate and our production performance.

We have deployed our new microservices, and we have continuous monitoring on New Relic  to take care of the application and the service performance and the traffic metrics from New Relic. We have configured some custom dashboards and we have some third-party integration of New Relic with Opsgenie  as an event dispatcher. We do have custom notifications for on-call support, and our Slack support, so these custom dashboards and custom metrics make our job easy to monitor our new services and performance of the new services.

We rely on New Relic dashboards for a lot of other key events, especially when there is a marketing campaign or when we know that our application traffic will spike. We monitor our CPU utilization and our error rate so keenly from New Relic. We will increase some of the thresholds and we will have some custom metrics to capture this new feature or new expected market spike, creating specific brand metrics accordingly.

New Relic offers custom dashboards and incident and alerting management with third parties like Slack and Jira , and it also has an AI or ML-based anomaly detection system where we can smartly identify whether there are predicted error rates for specific services or components of the UI.

We rely mostly on incident and alerting integrations and custom dashboards, while the AI and ML-based anomaly detection is a one-time configuration that handles events in a generic manner to predict the next incoming trends of errors or unexpected traffic spikes. These custom dashboards are specifically created for our application segment, and we heavily rely on creating multiple queries or custom queries for these metrics. For incident and alerting, we update metrics and the incident response team to quickly resolve issues based on our specific use case.

New Relic has positively impacted our organization by reducing errors, improving performance, and saving time. It has been an awesome tool for identifying errors on time, and even though it does not directly change our code, we use New Relic to identify errors ahead of any other application performance monitoring tool. We continuously improve performance by monitoring metrics, dashboards, error rates, and custom metrics.

For our end-to-end use case, New Relic is completely satisfactory, and we extensively rely on its features for our day-to-day life. I would like to have more AI and ML-based suggestions and algorithms from New Relic, and while the New Relic dashboards and UI are customizable, they can sometimes lead to a clumsy behavior. A smart AI assistance to organize our dashboards and explain features and functionalities can be a wish-to-have feature to help us leverage what New Relic offers.

As I mentioned earlier regarding wish-to-have features, New Relic can improve by incorporating more AI insights. When there is a component or UI customization, having a smart AI agent to guide users on customizing New Relic would significantly ease the process. This helps users who possess a technology-specific skill set and might find a learning curve overwhelming when using complex applications like New Relic or other performance-related tools.

I have been using New Relic for more than three to four years now, and we use New Relic extensively as our daily visit for our coffee time. We will be monitoring the dashboards and we have some of the integrations with Slack and then our teams and then our mailing systems. We extensively use New Relic to monitor our application performance, degradations, and then our Apdex scores.

New Relic is completely stable in our environment, and we have not experienced any issues internally regarding logging or lags with the service.

New Relic is completely scalable for our use case. We currently use New Relic for tens of thousands of developers and hundreds of teams within our organization, and we have not encountered any scalability issues, maintaining isolated application sections along with custom dashboards accessed by specific teams.

Customer support from New Relic is very good, and we rarely need to create support tickets. Our dedicated team engages directly with New Relic support to address any issues, whether related to internal downtimes or external factors like Cloudflare  or AWS  downtimes.

Positive

Prior to New Relic, we were using Sumo Logic, which we found to be outdated and frustrating, particularly in its environment segmentation and log analysis time. The integration experiences with New Relic greatly surpass those of Sumo Logic, providing us with a modern and effective application monitoring solution with enhanced dashboard visualization capabilities.

There is a definite return on investment for New Relic, as we would not have invested in building its infrastructure if there were no returns. We track metrics related to our integrations with New Relic internally in Jira , using story points to measure how much New Relic reduces our application monitoring overhead. While we do not have a dedicated resource solely for New Relic, our full-stack developers share responsibilities on multiple fronts, including working with New Relic.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, these aspects are managed at our organizational level, so it is not just my individual use case contributing to the costs. However, considering the features New Relic offers, the pricing or cost setup has not been a blocker for our budget.

Before choosing New Relic, we evaluated options including Splunk and other performance monitoring solutions. However, New Relic stood out as an exceptional tool, and we made a seamless transition from our previous alerting system to unify all teams under New Relic without hesitation.

For our faster incident response, we almost respond to an incident in no time thanks to thresholds and alerting metrics being properly in place. We have immediate responses upon finding incidents, and for reduced downtime, we take these metrics seriously to dig deep for root causes. Regarding improved user experience, we experiment with our application features using A/B testing, which helps us monitor trends and user interactions effectively. For example, we created a revamped website with modern components and ran a 50/50 A/B test on traffic, gaining insights on user preferences between the new and old design, which we tracked through New Relic.

I would suggest that teams interested in New Relic start by learning about application performance monitoring systems. To effectively utilize all New Relic features, understanding the purpose and integration of New Relic within your system is essential. With a solid foundation of why New Relic is needed, users will observe rather than merely look at system data, while being patient to learn and configure these systems effectively. I have given this review a rating of nine out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS)