What do you like best about the product?

NRQL, New Relic's customer query language, forms a fundamental layer of the platform that sets it above the competitors from our perspective. The competition try to state that NRQL has a steep learning curve that makes usage harder, however there are many ways that New Relic overcome that: strong documentation, samples throughout the platform, and even AI that can generate NRQL queries for you.

The agents are trivial to install and set up, with the documentation being well maintained. New Relic have a strong commitment to Open Telemetry, helping customers avoid vendor lock-in.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are attempts in New Relic to use AI-like tools to understand the root cause of incidents in complex interconnected systems, but frankly we've never found this to be effective, so while it can highlight all the various issues occurring it does not seem able to pin point which issues are the cause and which are the symptoms. We've had to build up custom dashboards and tooling to fill this gap.

New Relic's price model allows free users to access custom dashboards for free, but puts a paywall around showing the same data in New Relic's own views. This pushes cost-sensitive customers to duplicate New Relic views in dashboards, which makes an overhead and reduces usability.

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

New Relic gives us the "single pane of glass" to understand all out platforms, across multiple data centres in the cloud and on-premise. The collation of data into one platform significantly reduces MTTR by helping us broaden everyone's awareness of their neighbour systems and opening up prior black boxes.