Item: New Relic
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with New Relic

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I'm using New Relic in a Django project, a site with high traffic and a subscription service, that's why it is important for us to have a solid monitoring system for our clients. In this particular case we are using New Relic to be sure that our site remains fast, reliable, and lets us react quickly to any major or minor error. New Relic also helps us monitoring the application to know if every part in the stack is working properly.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Show detailed information about the performance of code functions and SQL queries.
Monitor the CPU, memory, and I/O usage of a Linux server.
Manage and send alerts about critical issues in your project.

Cons

The web dashboard frontend is sometimes slow.
Pricing model is too big business oriented, it is expensive for startups.

Return on Investment

We have achieved an increase in sales due to speed improvements in slow methods and functions.
Better customer satisfaction thanks to detailed information about bottlenecks in our database queries.
Quick reaction on rare client problems and errors in our platform thanks to New Relic's instant notification.

Alternatives Considered

Dynatrace

Dynatrace was not as easy and solid as New Relic for the first implementation of the APM. We had more issues and we had to spend more time to setup the initial environment. New Relic also has more integrations with existing languages, frameworks, and CMS, and it has a great 24/7 online support that we didn't find in Dynatrace.

Other Software Used

Magento Open Source, Django Waffle, Zapier

Likelihood to Recommend

After my experience, I found New Relic well suited if you have a critical online service or product and also a dedicated team to mantain and improve it over time. New Relic gives you a lot of interesting data to help you make technical and customer related decisions. One of our services is a web application where users can buy services between them, and it's critical for us to keep all services up and running without errors.

New Relic Feature Ratings

Using New Relic

Users and Roles

4 - There are three developers and one technical director using the platform.

Support Headcount Required

4 - New Relic is made for DevOps. The skills required are both from development and / or operations. Any developer can setup and use New Relic products, and give support to other coworkers that are not in the development team.

Business Processes Supported

Track real time performance in eCommerce products.
Detect unusual patterns during the sales process.
Get alerts when something is about to fail so we can solve issues before it happens.

Innovative Uses

Setup agents inside Django apps to see real time performance of code and database.
Connect New Relic directly with Magento

Future Planned Uses

Add monitoring to our iOS and Android eCommerce apps
Connect to our catalog of API
Monitor Kubernetes clusters

Likelihood to Renew

I have not yet found any similar product that offers me this range of features to help us keep our online service fast and reliable. Besides this, New Relic is constantly evolving by adding new plugins to emerging technologies and platforms. Server performance measuring features are a key point as our user database grows.

Evaluating New Relic and Competitors

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Reputation
Third-party Reviews

I know that most reliable products are the ones with a more powerful user base, and New Relic had a great product reputation from developers and devops from the beginning. New Relic has a great team behind and that's why we chose this platform. Also, there's a lot of good feedback and reviews everywhere.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I still think that New Relic is the greatest platform against competition. My opinion has not changed so our evaluation process would be exactly the same. We use well know open source products like Magento and Drupal, and New Relic is 100% compatible with them.

New Relic Implementation

Implementation Rating

It's better to start by implementing New Relic in one project and test everything. Try to follow best recommended practices and read all the official documentation. Everything seems well tested. Then, start by installing agents to the rest of your projects and keep a close look to all logs and metrics New Relic gives you.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Implementation Issues

Error logs showing in apps and not in New Relic.
Not seeing data in APM agent.

New Relic Support

Support Rating

New Relic has online and 24/7 fast and great support, also with deep technical knowledge to help you solve all your setup issues.

New Relic Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Bug Resolution

Exceptional Examples of New Relic Support

We had a Python Django app that dit not show errors in a log file. New Relic provided us with support from an application engineer that helped us solving the issue. The problem was in our app and not inside New Relic.

Using New Relic

Usability

New Relic interface can be tricky to setup sometimes, especially on dashboards, but the overall usability is great. We also find particularly interesting the chart creation tools. There are no major issues that prevented us using any of their services.