New Relic: the Observability Platform

My main use case for New Relic  is to monitor application health on a daily basis. Starting with my day, I go to the dashboards to check how the application health is and any alerts already triggered for the application, whether it concerns disk, memory, CPU, or how the applications are running. Recently, we had a slow query running for the application, which was really the bottleneck as it took a long time for the application to respond, and we found it out by using New Relic  to identify the slow query, which really helped me.

To troubleshoot and resolve the slow query issue once New Relic points it out, I generally go to the Application Performance Monitoring , which is APM , and then I check in APM for the query where there are different tabs, including one for the database. After that, I go and check the database, which shows what query is taking how much time. Since we are using Java applications, we can see how much time the queries take. We are also using some Cassandra  for caching purposes, which can show that query. I checked with the developer about a simple select query that took a long time, and after I spoke with them, they fine-tuned that query, resolving the issue. New Relic proved really helpful in finding out the slow query.

New Relic is easy to use even for someone with no knowledge; by seeing the dashboard, they can easily find out the application's health and notice what is happening. This is a significant advantage compared to other APM monitoring tools, and another aspect I appreciate is its good alerting mechanism, which can throw alerts and can be configured with PagerDuty or Slack, allowing easy checks on triggers and troubleshooting using New Relic.

The best features New Relic offers include APM, which stands out most prominently, along with Synthetic monitoring, which also really helps. Infrastructure can be checked too, but since our organization is using these modules, through APM, I can see the heap memory, application CPU, and memory, which are crucial from the application's perspective. Multiple alerts can also be configured using APM, making it extremely interesting.

Synthetic monitoring is similar to a mix of APM and other tools. I can create multiple dashboards using Synthetics, allowing me to view synthetic monitoring in a single shot, which gives good confidence in checking my day-to-day work.

New Relic features customized monitoring, which allows us to customize and distribute dashboards, and it really helps us. New Relic has positively impacted my organization by providing faster detection capabilities, allowing us to easily find issues, which is the best advantage. We can also improve application performance by finding the actual root cause of issues, which I find really beneficial.

Regarding faster detection and improved performance, there are instances where, when the application specifies its heap memory around 20 GB, and it tries to reach about 90%, New Relic immediately detects the heap memory alert, sends it over Slack, and even calls us using Slack. This lets us easily detect the issue and delve into what Java is causing that high heap memory usage, allowing us to investigate further.

New Relic can get pricey for larger organizations.

Specifically, it's the pricing for larger scale deployments that could be improved.

I have been working in my current field for almost six years, and I have been using New Relic for almost five years.

New Relic is 100% stable in my experience.

The scalability of New Relic is very high, as I have never seen any downtime issues or similar problems.

I have reached out to customer support multiple times for various cases, particularly for customization such as creating dashboards, and my experience has been good.

Positive

I would advise others looking into using New Relic that it is friendly, easy to use, and distributed, with NRQL queries that you can easily write to check for issues.

New Relic is a very good product in the market compared to others; it is really helpful for beginners as they learn about this product, and it proves beneficial when performing longevity tests to find latency issues, making it very interesting to identify where actual latencies occur, resulting in it being an excellent product from my perspective.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate New Relic a 10 out of 10.

I have worked with New Relic  for approximately three to four years.

The best features in New Relic  include its numerous API integrations and a good source of support. The support is excellent, and they provide blogs and forums. There is something called NRQL, New Relic Query Language, which can be used to query many things and retrieve data. Using API calls allows you to automate and pull a dashboard out of it, making manipulation easily done. These are some things I have done with New Relic as an end customer.

It reduces the operational overhead. Your data is monitored end to end, which could be directly linked with the SLA and SLO. That is the main thing.

New Relic can be improved by incorporating an automated incident analysis solution. They have comprehensive enterprise data, and based on that, they could generate and forecast things. They can predict anomalies, and even though anomaly prediction is already there, it can be improved.

Using real-time data, if there are any malicious patterns or something happening, they can identify those. They really need to stream the data and have something important running, such as predicting or identifying any suspicious activity. If they could develop these features, it would be very beneficial.

In my opinion, New Relic is a stable solution.

I would rate the technical support from New Relic as nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of New Relic is pretty easy. It is very well documented.

The deployment of New Relic was done in-house.

I am not sure about ROI as I have not gone over that. However, it reduces the operational overhead. Your data is monitored end to end, which could be directly linked with the SLA and SLO. That is the main thing.

I have experience with various Amazon solutions, but I am not really involved in the data-related role. My scope is that I work within some specific services. In my organization, I am part of an engineering team where I work only with these specific things. I love to explore these things, but I do not have much hands-on experience, and I am not a subject matter expert.

I have worked with Zabbix  and Grafana . Grafana  is a visualization tool that allows you to ingest existing data and visualize it while taking a report out of it. It is a great monitoring dashboard tool. Currently, in my company, they are using other solutions DataDog and New Relic. However, I would choose Grafana. It is open-source, and the enterprise edition is also available. The open-source version is more than enough for an enterprise to have their data visualized.

New Relic is suitable for banking domains, investment brokerage products, or anything related to high-security data. Organizations might use New Relic because they want their data stored and they want the support. It works as a whole monitoring solution, including logging, monitoring, and application profiling tools. It has a good set of API for managing alerts, and many automations can be done in New Relic. It is an enterprise solution that requires payment.

I rate New Relic eight out of ten.