World Class Application Monitoring
February 23, 2019
World Class Application Monitoring
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
New Relic for Web Apps
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
Our SaaS platform is used for healthcare, so uptime is absolutely critical. Almost everyone uses New Relic or the data from New Relic. Our engineering department gets paged if there's a problem, Software QA uses it to benchmark website performance, and the customer support and sales teams use it to measure how we're doing with our SLAs. Without it, we'd be almost totally in the dark as to how our application was behaving.
- A single tool to rule them all! New Relic can give you almost any kind of performance data you'd like to see. I wouldn't quite say it's single-pane of glass since their modules are discrete with minimal cross-links, but having several views into your application with a single tool is pretty powerful!
- Their APM module is first class. I think AppDynamics and DataDog might be about their closest competitors, but most everyone else just doesn't compete. I even had a hardware monitoring vendor tell me they had an APM offering that was far cheaper than New Relic, but by his own admission, was not worth considering if put next to New Relic's APM.
- Plugins. This is a pro and a con, as it's nice that you can extend their monitoring sets, but we would like some of this to be part of their standard offering. It is possible to set up your own data channels though, and monitor pretty much any customer metric you'd like to!
- Price. This is the biggest issue for us. It's far from cheap. But every time we look at other options, it seems pretty clear that you get what you pay for.
- Plugins again. While it's nice that you can feed your own custom data into New Relic, there are some things that seem really odd considering that they aren't working by default. Some examples: Monitoring AWS infrastructure via CloudWatch, db performance (APM is application side only, isn't clear about what's going on at the DB layer), etc.
- API keys are really, really confusing. While this is such a small little thing, the moment you start integrating New Relic with other tools such as Dashboards, it'll drive you bonkers. There are three different types of API keys, the documentation isn't overly clear about which one gets you the data you want, and it doesn't follow user ACLs at all. For certain data, the user must be a full admin just to get read access. They really ought to overhaul this, allow service accounts, allow each API key to access all data based on the associated account's ACL, and have all API keys tied directly to an account/ACL.
- Being able to show past application performance is critical to closing new deals. New Relic is our source for all that data.
- Quickly addressing issues is also critical. This alerts us before customers do, and it also gives us the historical data to address the issue quickly.
AppDynamics is very similar to New Relic, and is probably the only product we evaluated that was competitive. There wasn't a clear winner between these two; we ultimately stayed with New Relic because AppDynamic's support wasn't incredibly impressive, and it didn't seem to have additional data that would provide any extra value. It was a good product, just wasn't worth making the switch.