The primary use case is monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

It gives insights to non-technical people about what technical issues are most important, how much it impacts customers, and potentially, where we should be targeting our development teams when they have time.

What is most valuable?

It has in-depth analysis using developer code for someone whose not traditionally a developer.

What needs improvement?

They could improve the education process and how people understand that these tools are very technical. I understand everything very quickly and where it all comes in because I grew up with the product, but right now if someone was to pick it up from day one, it is a very steep learning curve.

The monitoring is only as good as the alerts that it produces. By having it set up fine grain alerting, it is a bit of a pain. They already have all these other companies that use their system, so they should easily be able do alerts based on deviations that we don't need to program on a per instance or artifact basis.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been stable for all our work lines.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

So far, I haven't hit any scaling issues with them, and the environments that I have come from have thousands of servers being monitored.

How is customer service and technical support?

Their technical support has been pretty good.

How was the initial setup?

It was quite hard to integrate, if you weren't technically skilled.

A lot of people who consume this product may not be technically skilled, but if you are, it is easy to use. From this perspective, it is really good, but this is an important aspect as well.

What was our ROI?

This was recently implemented at the current place that I work. Previously, without a monitoring solution, a developer could potentially spend a day working on a feature or a bug to try and resolve and issue. Now, a lot of the times, with monitoring put in place, we can understand if a customer is actually hitting this bug, and how often they are hitting it, and how much frustration they are dealing with on a day-by-day basis, then reprioritize our tasks. It gives our developers that insight, or it gives less skilled engineers or less technical leads the ability to ramp up quickly on what that particular bug is, so we can easily scale out. So, the cost of solving that problem isn't just reliant on a tech lead understands the system or built the system. Anyone can find the issue, including associates, and the amount of time they spend debugging has been reduced by a lot.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

They gave us aggressive discounts when they were brought in for the first time, but they have also kept them for the year-on-year renewals, which has been absolutely fine. Thus, we haven't looked to change.

The pricing and licensing are good if you have an account manager and a partner manager who are looking to help out.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We also evaluated AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

We chose New Relic because they have a slightly different pricing model. We were aggressively negotiating price, which means they gave us a pretty good price. Since then, they have continued upholding that same level of customer service, discounts, and partner level. So, it has been really nice working with them.

What other advice do I have?

You definitely need this product if you want scale and stability.

It fulfills what it's designed to do. Their constant iteration of features means it will always keep us well-informed about that particular requirement about the software.

We are also using New Relic with PagerDuty and Slack. They integrate pretty seamlessly. A couple of button pushes, and it was done.