It tells us our average performance over time and pinpoints our key problems, although the UI is overcomplicated.
What is most valuable?
Just to show the response time of the app, and how much time each request spends in the tiers. Database is a tenth of a second, web takes two-tenths, and Ruby takes one-tenth.
I can tell you that there are two use cases. One is to look at how we are performing on average over time. So, assuming the systems are healthy and we look at the last month, the average response time is very good at telling us that. Let's say I add capacity, I can see it trend downwards. The other use case is pinpoint key problems happening right now. Uber called and they are saying that their Freshdesk isn’t working. We look in and can see clearly that only the database is taking 27 times longer than it should, and it helps us solve acute broken things.
It helps with current broken things and help us understand what is happening on our system overall.
How has it helped my organization?
It just gives us an idea for how fast were running. That cuts down to it -- how fast we're running, and if there is slowness, where it's coming from. It's really fast at telling us.
What needs improvement?
I would say that the user interface is maybe a little bit overly complicated. But I don’t have any specific way to improve it. I would say that what’s not commonly used, that are rarely used, should be less conspicuous and buried behind. Like your iPhone has one or two buttons -- if you need settings you can dig down to that stuff, but you don’t want that in your face when you take a call. Similarly, when you are in New Relic there are all these things that I need to sift through mentally. I just want to see how fast the apps are responding. You can’t change that.
I want to see the potential for Docker statistics or container statistics. Like if we start running containers, will it be able to track data for a given container. If one container serves one purpose, we need to track how many requests per day, when does the usage peek, how much does it vary week to week. And then that needs to be organized per container.
Finally, there's lot of noise on the front page that I don’t want to see. If it is customizable then it isn't obvious. Another nuance is that it always shows the wrong throughput for the most recent five minutes, and it's always wrong. The system is wrong for the most recent five minutes. They show wrong data and that changes after the five minutes is up.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
10/10 - it's very stable. It went down, maybe, once.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Super scalable. For us it scales for what we need. Scale means does it work as well if you have three nodes or 500, and it does. It doesn't break when you scale it up.
How are customer service and support?
I don’t know. Never had a problem. Never had an issue with it. Really simple, like your microwave. Does it well so I never needed support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This has always been our solution since we started.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked for a product that gives the data in a way that is easy to visualize, is reliable, and is simple.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
When there’s a deployment, it shows by graphing if a regression has happened, and it allows us to react. However, every now and then there are little quirks.
What is most valuable?
It helps you to define the transaction percentages, average time, and highest throughput. Also, it tells us the transactions that take the most time on average. Those are the high level, most useful features.
It also tells us about every single request that comes in and how the system reacts to it. You get to see everything from the dashboard, all these breakdowns per layer of your architecture.
Error rate is the second most useful feature – there are alerts tied to that. You get paged when the error rate is above an expected percentage and that has worked very consistently and reliably for us.
How has it helped my organization?
The best thing is that the team has grown, and a lot of people are developing the code, but you tend to have regressions that are clearly visible in those transaction traces.
When there’s a deployment, it shows by graphing if a regression has happened, and it allows us to react. Catching regressions in performance is very important, and since we now see the breakdown in every single layer in the application, you know right away if there’s something you’re not expecting. We can then go and figure out if it’s an infrastructure or code issue. It gives you a high level view of all of the requests coming in. Error rates are a good indicator for potential rollbacks for a potential deployment – and usually it’s pretty instantaneous. At the end of the day as users, we get what we want.
What needs improvement?
For the purposes for which we’re using it, it just works. So far I don’t have any requests for new features.
Currently, it is not the only solution we have for monitoring so there are things that it’s missing – for example what Datadog does for us. Timeline series, custom timelines and graphs, and I’m not aware of those features in New Relic.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Every now and then there are little quirks, like the web site will stop refreshing by itself, or the graphs will show something that’s not happening. But in my experience just refreshing the graphs will fix it. But we’ve never had any downtime with New Relic.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have scaled up as well in terms of number of hosts. There is some perceivable difference in performance when you’re looking at a graph versus number of hosts, but so far it has been fine. It’s definitely not the same looking at a single host versus many hosts.
How are customer service and technical support?
The fact that I’ve never had to contact support by email or phone is a good thing. The online documentation has been fantastic. Everything you want is available in the documentation.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
It was already in production. I did deployments in the staging environment, but not the first deployment. We will be doing the first deployment for mobile as well.
How was the initial setup?
It was already in production. I did deployments in the staging environment, but not the first deployment. We will be doing the first deployment for mobile as well.
What other advice do I have?
You need to understand what’s in their stack, what technologies, what libraries, and it takes someone who has experience with those technologies to help make the decision. It also comes down to best bang for your buck, and I’d definitely recommend New Relic APM.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
We like that in server pools, you can install the agent on one server and that it supports plug-ins (RMQ, Redis etc.).
Pros and Cons
"Support for plug-ins (RMQ, Redis etc.) is a valuable feature."
How has it helped my organization?
It was the first tool our company used for application level monitoring. It doesn't require much investment or technical expertise to implement, and I would recommend it for SME.
What is most valuable?
Support for plug-ins (RMQ, Redis etc.) is a valuable feature.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Older versions of .NET.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The agents are updated quite frequently, but New Relic doesn't offer tools for doing the upgrade in large environments.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
It's good.
Technical Support:
We had several issues that were dealt with by there tech support, and their level is pretty good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No previous solution was in place.
How was the initial setup?
The setup is quite simple and there are plenty of online resources.
What about the implementation team?
We did it in-house.
What was our ROI?
Since the plug-ins that report to New Relic do not require license, the ROI is high.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
In server pools, you can install the agent on one server. Also, make sure you make the most out of using plug-ins as they don't require licenses.
What other advice do I have?
We are using it also for monitoring of Azure cloud.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
It helps us monitor our performance by giving us clear unobtrusive insights with weighted numbers, and although it integrates with Docker, it's missing a few minor metrics.
What is most valuable?
Application monitoring. The fact that we can trace a request through all the layers of the application (gateway-app server-database (persistent and caching layers)) and trace all the steps in between, is invaluable to us!
How has it helped my organization?
We can monitor our performance easily using the metrics, Apex, that New Relic have devised. This is a weighted number (0 to 1) which gives us a clear unobtrusive insight into our performance. Therefore, by leveraging the API, we can integrate the current performance metrics of our entire stack into our wall-boards and internal reporting.
What needs improvement?
With the recent introduction of Docker integration we're seeing increased metric collection, but are also missing a few minor metrics and deployment setups.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using it for over five years now.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
In a regular and normal usage, deploying the agent (either PHP, NodeJS or the server agent) is very simple and intuitive. We do however run into issues integrating the PHP agent into the Dokku deployments, but we have been working with the Dokku/Heroku/New Relic support staff to fix this.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is fairly stable. There have been issues in the past where stability was not fully reliable, but all problems were quickly resolved and we personally haven't had any data loss issues of any kind.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't seen any issue that affect us personally.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
It's a big 10/10. The engagement of the customer service either via tickets or the public forum is excellent.
Technical Support:
After building our initial integration with our framework several years ago the technical support engineer provided us with great insight and it really was a two way street of communication: we provided ideas that were implemented and they also gave us insight into optimal integration points.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We've tried various other tools over the years, but after giving New Relic a try, we haven't looked back.
How was the initial setup?
The initial set-up was at the time the most straightforward and easy as imaginable. This really pushed us over the edge of giving it a go and loving it from day one.
What about the implementation team?
We did it ourselves, and it's easy.
What was our ROI?
Since it's an application monitoring platform the actual ROI is a lot harder to calculate than other services directly related to the business. We do however see an increased focus on performance and therefore have a good ROI. It's also due to the fact that there are ways to keep the costs of New Relic down and still have the benefits.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Just try it out and install it on a couple of systems. You could go "all in" and have the full license and instalment on everything, but certainly during start-up, you could leverage a couple of instalments and still have insights, if it's installed into core parts of your set-up
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Can't remember which platforms were out there. Soon after we started with New Relic, AppDynamics went live, and much later Server Density added APM. They both seem like worth competitors, but as previously mentioned: we have no reason to switch yet.
What other advice do I have?
Just give it a go and see how it goes.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
With the reporting/alerting and SLA feature we can generate reports to see the average response on days/weeks/months, but labelling and tagging should be more user-friendly.
Valuable Features
We can, in seconds, discover and point to the component/code that is giving us performance issues without debugging all the code.
After some days of using the product, we could optimize the code of multiple critical application used by our customers and, therefore, provide better, more stable services.
The ROI was there already after several days. Debugging and finding issues was taking, at a minimum, several days, now we can do it several hours.
Improvements to My Organization
We can get a complete and detailed view of each component of our product and focus immediately on performance issues, or give priority to the code/component we want to optimize.
Also, with the reporting/alerting and SLA feature we can generate reports to see the average response on days/weeks/months.
Lastly, it can help us compare between days, so we can see the impact of a deployment of new code on performance.
Room for Improvement
Labelling and tagging should be more user-friendly. It needs some more features.
Use of Solution
We've used it for more than one year, almost two. For some months we had temporary licenses, then we bought the required licensed when we saw the add-on value of the product.
Stability Issues
There were some small bugs with the ability to update the dashboard the driver, RAM, and CPU after we upgraded to a server application. We had to ask New Relic to manage this issue on their side.
Scalability Issues
No issues encountered.
Customer Service and Technical Support
Customer Service:
9/10 - very good and fast response. They always try to provide real support to understand your target, your issue, and try to find a solution to reach their customers target and satisfaction.
Technical Support:
9/10. They know their product and most of technical replies are very clear, working, exactly as they say, and are easy to implement.
Initial Setup
The deployment is easy, and it only takes one minute to install the package at the OS level for a server via RPM, and via agent for different applications where you integrate them in your application. It would be difficult to do make it simpler.
It was peanuts, and you install the agent/plugin on your OS or application, then you start your application or the agent on the OS, and it is automatically integrated in the dashboard on the cloud. It's impressive how it is so simple.
Implementation Team
You install it yourself.
ROI
In several days, we got a great ROI due to an issue in an customer application. In the past, it was taking days for our developers to find the root cause of performance, and the slowest component. Now, in seconds, we can point direclty to the code/component that is slow, that has issues, and allow the developers to directly focus on working on the code to provide an optimized and stable code to deliver better service to the customer.
Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing
Price and licensing is very efficient and correct.
Other Solutions Considered
We looked at other products, but we had first priority on an ROR/Ruby application for a new application. The payroll exchange used by our customers all over the world and some good competitors didn't support ROR/Ruby applications.
Other Advice
It's very good but still needs to be enhanced. Test it by implementing it, and in minutes, you will analyze the results and the dashboard and adopt it.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
It provides a single pane for operation teams to look at and get to the root cause of issues, although alerts tend to show how an entire cluster, and not just the issue-causing node, is performing.
What is most valuable?
It's easy to install and to configure.
The UI interface and navigation make it easy for a novice user to quickly use the provided relevant performance application data to determine how well their application is performing and to see other areas which may require some further tuning.
How has it helped my organization?
It provides a single pane for operation teams to look at and get to the root cause of issues. This allows them to take the required corrective actions and to remove some of the blame game. People can only look at their own isolated metrics.
What needs improvement?
Ability to set-up maintenance windows, so silent time can be given to monitors for a defined period of time.
Alerts tend to show how an entire cluster is performing, and not only that a given node is having an issue. To get around this issue one can use parent-child relationships in the naming of given applications and set the alert conditions at the child levels.
For browser, the need to provide an interface which allows us to define a given business transaction, e.g. define all the steps of a given credit submittal. This is somewhat possible using “Funnels” with New Relic Insights.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using it for a little over a year and a half and have it in the following -
APM deployed across JBOSS, Tomcat, WebLogic, Glassfish, ActiveMQ, .Net
Server deployed across RedHat, CentOs, and Windows 2008/2012
DevOps deployment of APM and server agent using chef cookbook
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
APM and server agents are deployed via a chef cookbook or shell scripts. In one case, we had a very old version of Java running and had to deploy a corresponding older version of New Relic.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It has been operational for over a year and a half across over 200+ applications on Java and .Net, with no negative impact to any of the systems.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Given that New Relic is a SaaS model we haven’t had any negative impact utilizing their UI to view given applications or do analytics with Insights.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
They are very dedicated and attentive to our needs as well as how their products can be utilized to enhance our support of given applications - 10/10.
Technical Support:
Their on-line technical support has always provided timely updates of any open tickets as well as very open to getting on a chat Webex to resolve issue. Many issues have been resolved on either the first or second exchange of notes in their ticketing system - 9/10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used HP Diagnostics and CA Introscope. We switched for several reasons -
UI interface required more training of the support teams to utilize the product because it wasn't as intuitive.
Large infrastructure to support and administer the environment.
Requires RUM appliance to tap the network so that we can gain insight into the end-user response.
How was the initial setup?
We deployed the agent via simple manual steps or via in-house written scripts.
What about the implementation team?
It was deployed by an in-house middleware team with vendor consulting in a few areas where the browser auto injection failed. The vendor team was very knowledgeable of their products and how to deploy and configure across an array of platforms.
What other advice do I have?
Implement APM and server on non-production environments as well, especially an environment where you are running performance testing from. BrowserPro should be a requirement, and you should look into New Relic Insights as it is a great diagnostic tool. Make sure you keep, at a minimum, a few months worth of detailed data as well as populating it with additional custom attributes or data from other systems.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
It is correct agree.
But regarding the Window period you could still disable in Application alert policies policies ---> so no alert for a number of server in this group.
Set a calendar with period/time/schedule should be better to deactivate policies/alert.
Regarding:
Alerts tend to show how an entire cluster is performing, and not only that a given node is having an issue. To get around this issue one can use parent-child relationships in the naming of given applications and set the alert conditions at the child levels.
It is correct you have to set additional name in the config file of your newrelic for your APM to "build" a parent-child relationship. It is easy to implement. Maybe the display in the dashboard should take into account this relation and show the node as sub-element of the cluster item in APM dashboard.
We're able to identify incorrectly optimized SQL queries, external machine bottlenecks, and other low performance issues.
Valuable Features
It helps us profile specific web server endpoints and identify what can be improved.
Improvements to My Organization
On a regular basis, we're able to identify incorrectly optimized SQL queries, external machine bottlenecks (i.e. higher throughput than can be handled), and other low performance issues.
Room for Improvement
I hope the next release has the ability to retain historical data.
A current limitation is comparing a present call with that of the same time the previous day, or previous week. It would be great to identify exactly which hours and days had lower performance than usual.
Use of Solution
I've used it since November 2013.
Deployment Issues
It's trivial.
Scalability Issues
It's trivial.
Customer Service and Technical Support
Support is quite good, around 8/10.
There is a lot of available resources online, and support leads you to their forums initially. Response times are within 24 hours if contacted by email.
Initial Setup
The initial setup was very straightforward.
The documentation is very complete and the procedure itself takes about five minutes, plus deployment time.
Implementation Team
New Relic is a software as a service so there is no implementation per se, just a setup.
Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing
Pricing is great!
There are many free plans, and the for pay ones add a few important features such as longer log backup.
Other Solutions Considered
I chose this product for its ease of integration with our software stack, and its very attractive price plan.
Other Advice
New Relic is a great SaaS which I will definitely continue using and will use in future products.
We're a very happy customer.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
It gives us insight into the performance of the entire stack as well as a view into which components have the biggest impact on customer experience.
What is most valuable?
The alerting is by far the most valuable feature, closely followed by the way the platform correlates incidents across applications and components.
We are able to derive very valuable insights into the performance of the entire stack, and most importantly, we get a view as to which components have the biggest impact on the customer experience.
How has it helped my organization?
We have both Ops and Tech Leads subscribed to the alerts now. In general the Ops team only responds to "server down" or other infrastructure issues, whereas the Tech Leads will become interested if errors are being thrown or the Apdex scores are affected. They then have the chance to observe the system during an issue, as well as grab stack dumps and thread traces that allow us to quickly identify issues that are hard or impossible to replicate in a test environment.
What needs improvement?
I would like some additional fine tuning control around the alerting. I would also like the ability to "store" particular errors or traces for longer than the normal week.
We are yet to investigate creating dashboards and building extensions so there's a lot about the platform we still haven't found.
The biggest issue is the lack of mobile support from the website. They do have an Android and iPhone app but I have a Windows Phone and it's virtually unusable.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've used it for about a year, and there are still a number of features we've yet to fully explore.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We see some exceptions in the machine Event Logs from time to time, and we occasionally see high CPU usage from the monitoring components but we've not seen any activity that compromised the stability of our systems as a result.
How are customer service and technical support?
Support people are very helpful and turn-around times are short. I have raised a number of tickets and I've always been happy with the outcome.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to use Microsoft System Center Operations Manager but this is really not ideal for our cloud-based deployments
How was the initial setup?
Deployment to our Windows, Ubuntu and .Net environments was very straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We provide managed services on Microsoft Azure and Verizon Terremark for a number of enterprise organizations including Government, Motor Vehicle Manufacturers and FMCG.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The hardest part was understanding the licensing and billing. The licensing and pricing was a challenge for us to understand, so speak to an Account Manager rather than simply buying online. I think they need a blog post about this.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated a number of solutions but this is the only platform we've fully deployed to production. We looked at MS System Center, DataDog, Paraleap and SolarWinds.
What other advice do I have?
Start with a trial to get a sense of which components perform what kind of task, then divide your environment into applications and servers that require data retention, and those that don't. Put them into two separate accounts. The ones that require retention will eventually become a Pro account.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Honest, simple review