Something something something New Relic
April 25, 2014
Something something something New Relic
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
New Relic for Web Apps
Modules Used
- Drupal
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
New Relic has given Penton Media a deeper understanding of the internal workings of Drupal and allowed us to spot and correct bottlenecks within code and our cluster stacks. The ability to see how Views perform as well as the number of external service calls per minute and per page is extremely valuable. Our executive team really enjoys and benefits from the histograms and stack performance graphs too.
- The stack tracing through service layers helps identify which service may be causing an issue.
- The New Relic Alerting tool allows operators to be alerted when a site is not performing as anticipated.
- Support has always been timely and helpful.
- The plugin management system is a little cumbersome.
- It is difficult to track down an anomaly event.
- It would be nice to have a waterfall view of how a page loads in the Real User Monitoring.
- Decreased bounce rate
- Increased page views
- Decreased client complaints about site slowness
Tracelytics was a great product, but data retention was lacking as was enterprise level features. The ability to pay per trace instead of per server was a great help in financing, but in the end the data wasn't available long enough to perform historical analysis and therefore unable to meet our needs.
Using New Relic
15 - Executive, Engineering and Development
15 - New Relic is pretty intuitive, so there is a lot of training to perform. A basic walk through of where things are what what things mean is enough for most individuals within our organization.
- Historical Tracking
- Build impacts
- User Experience performance
- We use New Relic to trace contributed modules and provide patches back to the community.
- Full server monitoring
Evaluating New Relic and Competitors
Yes - We originated with New Relic, but left for Tracelytics (AppNeta) due to some better graphing and data point tracking. Unfortunately the data retention was severely lacking; on the order of 3 months retention. New Relic eventually caught up with data points being tracked and came out with several new langauges to monitor as well as extensions for Drupal. We couldn't stay away from New Relic anymore and left Tracelytics.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
Custom tracing for Drupal was the single most important factor in our selection, closely followed by historical data analysis tools.
I would probably evaluate more companies as they each have tradeoffs. Tracelytics was great because you could pay per trace whereas New Relic is pay per server; but New Relic just has better tools.
New Relic Implementation Rating and Lessons
- Implemented in-house
Yes - We first tested and rolled out the PHP Agent in our development and staging environments to verify functionality and stability. There were only one or two instances in which the agent would crash. New Relic was always great about fixing issues and providing us with pre-release patched versions to resolve our issues.
Change management was a major issue with the implementation - New Relic allowed us to see, historically, where things would go wrong. In example, was new code loaded the night before? Did we make database updates? Any environment changes? It stopped a lot of he said she said speculation about the start and cause of the problem.
- Application naming issues with php-cgi
- Initially had broken builds for certain PHP versions and ISAPIs; always quickly fixed