Continuous monitoring has improved incident response and supports data driven performance tuning
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
New Relic is completely stable in our environment, and we have not experienced any issues internally regarding logging or lags with the service.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Improved incident detection has reduced response times and supports better customer agreements
What is our primary use case?
New Relic is primarily used for log monitoring, where queries on the logs provide insights and create log-based metrics for all alerting-related requirements. The focus is mainly on alerting and dashboards.
How has it helped my organization?
New Relic helped with the mean time to detection, the MTDD metric tracked for applications. For the platform, the detection capability enabled a reduction from around 20 to 30 minutes down to three minutes. This has been really helpful in terms of detecting issues as well as helping to triage and troubleshoot issues faster, creating a positive impact on the organization.
What is most valuable?
One of the best features that New Relic offers is the user interface, which is much easier to use compared to other products such as Datadog or Splunk. The team management and alert configuration process is also fairly straightforward. New Relic is very useful for teams that don't have much of a dedicated DevOps team but want to have observability for their platform, and it's an easy way to get started.
One of the main UI features is the ability to see a particular frequency, such as an error or a high amount of logs at a particular timestamp, and easily filter that via the graph as well as the timestamps that can be configured. This is relatively easy to use compared to other products.
What needs improvement?
New Relic is priced on the higher side. Because of the pricing model, organizations have experienced uncontrolled costs and were not able to afford New Relic, which resulted in moving to open-source solutions such as Grafana and Loki. This pricing structure has been the main pain point experienced with New Relic.
For how long have I used the solution?
New Relic has been used for the past two years.
What was our ROI?
One of the metrics that helped as a return on investment was the ability to detect issues faster and troubleshoot more quickly, which in turn helped to achieve a much better service level agreement with customers.
What other advice do I have?
Pricing is primarily an area of concern. The overall rating for New Relic is eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Has improved monitoring efficiency with robust alerting and automation features
What is our primary use case?
I have worked with New Relic for approximately three to four years.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In my opinion, New Relic is a stable solution.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate the technical support from New Relic as nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of New Relic is pretty easy. It is very well documented.
What about the implementation team?
The deployment of New Relic was done in-house.
What was our ROI?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
