New Relic is a good product for medium to large businesses.
March 27, 2019
New Relic is a good product for medium to large businesses.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
New Relic for Web Apps
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
We used New Relic (NR) while we were experimenting with highly scalable fault-tolerant web apps. In a micro-service architecture, it is hard to draw lines between individual server level reports and collective application reports. We found out about New Relic through Google ads and there were some promotions going on regarding free t-shirts and so on, so we decided to try it. We used NR for application monitoring purposes in a 3-instance environment scaled across 3 different AZ.
- It was particularly good at aggregating the results and showing one view for it. The views were customizable and easy to work with.
- We definitely appreciated the range of processes you can monitor using New Relic. It was a good solution to monitor servers and DBs.
- Loved the ability to integrate different plugins as per our use case. This way we also came to know about some metrics that we didn't initially account for, and it helped us a lot in figuring out our performance.
- Given that we were using different AZ, New Relic helped us see the different response times from different geography.
- First and foremost, their UI needs to implement better web sockets. This would definitely improve the performance and make it light weight.
- We were doing experiments back then, and were short on fundings like any other startup. So we made the decision to not use any feature that might create a hard dependency for us. Hence we only used the free features. I wish there was a better pricing model for startups.
- Not really a big issue, but maybe they can sponsor better documents, like a step by step setup process, in sites like Medium that people can follow. Their documentation is kind of overwhelming.
- Since we decided not to try NR with a paid version, our efforts to learn and use NR was mostly an experiment rather than an investment. Its good to know about the tool, and we might even pursue this in the future, but as of now, we didn't choose to go for the pro version.
- In our assessment, there is a medium learning curve. Be prepared to read lots of documentation. So at least one of your resources needs to be dedicated to this.
- One positive impact that we felt was that we came to know of different metrics that really helped us understand our performance.
We definitely appreciated New Relic for its ability to show one view for the entire application with a micro-service of instances. Once you can get your dashboard up and running, there is definitely a lot of potential. For a short period, we were totally relying on these metrics to enhance the performance of our web app.
Going to the cloud is challenging on its own. Adding New Relic wasn't quite easy when you consider CICD and automation. AWS is already big and complicated, so adding NR was tough. It didn't help us reduce AWS cost because that is not what we were using it for. One thing is good about New Relic though - it doesn't matter if you are using AWS, Azure, or GAE; NR will work the same for you.
NR wasn't quite helpful to us in the DevOps sector. It could be because of our lack of knowledge of New Relic, but we had a hard time automating the install of NR to all our AWS instances that were created using auto-scaling groups. Then there is the matter of your instance type. Our Java application was already using the memory to its capacity of the micro instance, and there was no room for NR to run, so we had to upgrade to a small instance.
Elasticsearch with its Beats technology is open source and has good community support. Amazon CloudWatch is another good alternative if you are using AWS because then the metrics are right there. In fact, I like CloudWatch especially because it is mostly free for basic use and does not eat up a lot of memory from your instance.