New Relic: the Observability Platform

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.

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.

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.

My main use case for New Relic  is for the visualization of performance tests. I use New Relic  for visualizing performance tests to understand whether the system I'm working on works as expected under a heavy load, and this is mostly related to Kafka systems. I usually send a lot of events via a Kafka topic to the system and check how many pods are available of the services, how many partitions are in use, and CPU usage.

Beyond my main use case, I also use New Relic as an investigation tool during incidents. It is very helpful when I need to examine how some services behaved based on CPU usage and memory, which is quite helpful, especially when looking into a deep understanding of what is occurring. For example, our services are Java-based, and I need to examine how some of the Java memory areas were occupied, and New Relic provides that information.

In my opinion, the best features New Relic offers include its quite universal query language, which I can use quite easily and have good visualization based on that query.

What I appreciate most about the universal query language and its visualization is mostly for understandability. The query language is quite understandable, and the problems mostly lie in understanding what data I need to pick up, not about how I need to query that data. Understanding how that works is very simple, especially regarding the query language for time series and the time frame I need to examine. The query language is quite easy to understand.

New Relic has positively impacted my organization regarding my main area of interest, which is performance tests, and by using New Relic, I received a lot of information to improve my systems. It is very helpful for incident investigation.

When considering how New Relic can be improved, the only thing that could be a bit confusing is that there are many things in New Relic, and sometimes I need to know where to find some visualization and some data that is flowing to New Relic from my system. It is not obvious for newcomers to understand where to find that data and where to look for it.

The needed improvements are mostly an issue for the company that uses New Relic. Whenever I create a new dashboard or other items, I need to document what I have done and put it into documentation. I believe that documenting is all that newcomers need.

I have been working in my current field for about five years.

New Relic is stable based on my experience, as I have not seen any problems with the UI. However, there could be problems or hiccups with the integration with Java-based services and microservices. I have seen logs indicating that the service is not able to send the metric or custom metric to New Relic, but that is mostly due to some internal infrastructure specifics.

New Relic's scalability is good based on my experience, and it can handle my organization's needs as they grow.

I have not interacted with customer support for New Relic because I did not have a chance to do so, as there were no problems with New Relic.

Before using New Relic, I used a combination of Grafana  and a relational database, but that was an ad hoc solution for me to visualize the data that was not in New Relic. Mostly, I use New Relic if it is possible.

I have a separate team for New Relic configuration and maintenance, so I do not know those details.

I have a separate team for New Relic configuration and maintenance, so I do not know those details.

I do not know whether my organization has seen a return on investment from using New Relic, but it has definitely shortened the time of incident investigation.

Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for New Relic, I have the same answer. I have a separate team for handling New Relic, so I do not know the details of the deployment, pricing, and buying.

I cannot answer whether my organization evaluated other options before choosing New Relic, but I am sure they chose based on several options.

I do not have anything else to add about the features, as that covers everything I wanted to discuss about New Relic.

When sharing a specific example of how New Relic helped me improve my system and resolve an incident, there was an incident regarding a database when I examined the memory distribution in a Java machine. I quite easily examined the memory distribution during the time I had that incident and understood, based on what memory area of the Java Virtual Machine was heavily occupied, what I needed to do to optimize my service.

I do not have advice to give to others looking into using New Relic because advice is about how the person should use it. However, it is quite simple, and I do not think that there will be any problems with that. I would rate my overall experience with New Relic an eight out of ten.