New Relic review by Architect @ SaaS company
July 11, 2014
New Relic review by Architect @ SaaS company
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
New Relic for Web Apps
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
We're a SaaS startup, so our website is our business. As we've grown, we've had performance problems crop up and new relic has been the source of truth for how we are doing on this front. From the engineers fixing the problems to the COO monitoring our progress, new relic has been instrumental in making this possible.
- I can quickly see how web and database transactions are scaling across my site. This allows us to quickly prioritize work each week.
- I can compare performance before and after changes are rolled out to measure the effects of development changes.
- I can drill down in data quickly and easily.
- Improving our performance is an iterative process. I wish I could flag when changes are released so I can easily generate "before and after" reports for changes and sets of changes.
- The transaction trace, by prioritizing database traffic higher than code, frequently loses all stack trace information for some of our problematic code. I've contacted support before and we have tried annotating the code. This has helped, but doesn't entirely solve the problem as we cannot force these annotations to be higher priority than DB calls. Knowing we're making 2000 calls to the database is less important than knowing WHERE we're making those 2000 calls.
- I'd like to see an option to list transactions by "slowest peak response time" instead of just average. This is because our average is often ok but our "worst offenders" are orders of magnitude worse.
- We've improved site performance, which has made our customers much happier as our application is in use all day every day by them.
- We've gathered detailed information about our user base and made informed technology decisions from this data.
- We've identified problems and bottlenecks for specific clients before they contacted us, gaining us instant credibility when we reached out to them with solutions.
The alternatives to New Relic do not have the top to bottom view of our site that New Relic has. They may solve a specific part of the puzzle, but they are not comprehensive and require much more work in massaging and manipulating data.