New Relic: the Observability Platform

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)

What do you like best about the product?

I like New Relic's ability to bring everything into one unified observability platform with real-time dashboards, distributed tracing, and seamless integration. It helps our DevOps team detect anomalies early and reduce downtime. The customizable and intuitive dashboards make it easier to stay ahead of issues. We also benefit from the improved visibility across our application and infrastructure, stronger distributed tracing, and deep insights that enhance collaboration between teams. Integration with tools like Slack and AWS makes monitoring seamless and quickly becomes a part of our daily workflow. I appreciate the straightforward initial setup, supported by clear documentation that allows for smooth integration.

What do you dislike about the product?

New Relic is great overall, but the pricing can get expensive as usage grows, and the interface can feel overwhelming at first with its many features. Some advanced tools like NRQL queries have a steep learning curve, and occasional delays in data updates mean monitoring isn't always perfectly real-time.

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

We use New Relic to monitor cloud-based services and performance, detect anomalies early, and reduce downtime. It improves performance visibility, helps track application health, reduces resolution time, and offers customizable dashboards and alerts for proactive issue management.

What do you like best about the product?

I really loved the UI and enhanced UI capabilities. Like i can get all infra related dashboards, logs, metrics, traces. A very powerful APM tool and specially the NRQL

What do you dislike about the product?

As a new user sometime it gets difficult to get adjusted because of so much features. Learning NRQL take some time. But since AI is booming that issue is also getting eliminated

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

It really does help me track down the issues of my AWS services and my domain related hits.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about New Relic is the complete end to end visibility it provides. It shows exactly how both the front end and backend programming, and the detailed insights like transaction traces, slow API breakdowns, and real user browser monitoring make identifying and fixing issues faster.

What do you dislike about the product?

What I dislike about New Relic is that the platform can feel overwhelming at first
because of the many features and dashboards. Some integrations require extra setup effort, and navigating logs, metrics, and traces is not always as smooth as it could be. And also the cost can increase quickly as data volume grows

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

New Relic helps me quickly identify performance bottlenecks across both the front end and backend. It pinpoints slow Apis, heavy database queries, JavaScript errors and real user experience issues. This end to end visibility reduces debugging time, improves application reliability, and allows us to proactively address problems before they impact users.