Much better than New Coke, you need to try New Relic today!
July 09, 2019
Much better than New Coke, you need to try New Relic today!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
Implemented across the entire organization, New Relic has been the platform that enabled our migration to Cloud IaaS and PaaS over the past 2 years. We use it with AWS, GCP, and Azure and across a wide variety of Linux and Windows OS flavors. We needed a way to empower teams with granular visibility into their infrastructure, applications, and the components that made it all work. With a goal to implement a Digital Experience Monitoring strategy aligned with the Gartner AIOps model (Algorithmic IT Operations), we found New Relic's suite of products delivered the best cost/benefit ratio.
- Granular visibility into time-series data.
- API allowing data to be written to a common dataset (Insights) and then visualized.
- Almost captures the unicorn of a "single pane of glass" view.
- Cloud-centric / OS-centric. There is no/limited ability to query metrics with an agent installed.
- Insights-based queries (dashboards and alerts) are limited to 1000 (soon to be 2000) records and that doesn't work for enterprise scale.
- NRQL is awesome -- except when it isn't. The replacement QL is more robust but is significantly more complex to learn.
- No agent management tools in the platform. And, yes, you will want agent management tools after the first dozen or so deployments.
- The product is expensive, but you do get what you pay for and we have made significant progress in adopting SRE/DevOps-style models in our platform teams with New Relic as an enabler.
- Teams are asking new questions. This usually means more costs because there is more data, but the questions are born out of more data-driven decision making, better MTTR to issues, etc.
- Adoption is fast and furious. Knowing how to stay within budget takes some serious effort. It is (almost) too easy to deploy new monitoring which drives an increase in costs.
This is really where New Relic shines. As long as you can install an agent, or if your platform has a supported/open API, then New Relic brings together a medley of monitoring and alerting functionality that is hard to find. Blending APM, Infrastructure, web performance, and a (reasonably) robust method of logging time-series data in a common database is really the beauty of the platform. A few other vendors do this as well (SolarWinds Orion does it, but more hardware focused) and it really is a massive differentiation between the various vendors.
Visibility is key. However, we opted to not deploy into our on-prem environment as we migrated/re-built in the Cloud. That said, we did use New Relic Infrastructure to view, trace, and solve performance-related issues when we moved our applications and OSes. While we didn't have a comparison within the platform from before and after, we did have metrics from a different tool. New Relic gave us the granularity to dig into the data and find where things were slowing down.
We followed an app-team/self-service model when we deployed. This is a strength for small teams/enterprises in the New Relic platform, but without the ability to do role-based access control (RBAC), managing access to data meant a lot of trial and error.
In the end, we have hundreds of sub-accounts aligned with our application support teams. Middleware teams hate it. Application teams love it. You can't make everyone happy all of the time!
In the end, we have hundreds of sub-accounts aligned with our application support teams. Middleware teams hate it. Application teams love it. You can't make everyone happy all of the time!
Although not in the list, Google Stackdriver is also in the competitive landscape for New Relic.
We assessed all 3 of the alternatives above. We found AppDynamics to be the superior product, but with a price tag aligned with that superiority. Datadog was the best infrastructure-focused platform. AppOptics was too new to the game when we did the assessment.
As our Architects like to preach, don't find a product and then build your functional and technical requirements, build your requirements and then find the product that matches. New Relic offers a very nice blend of infrastructure, APM, web, and other services in a single user interface. I would definitely use them again.
We assessed all 3 of the alternatives above. We found AppDynamics to be the superior product, but with a price tag aligned with that superiority. Datadog was the best infrastructure-focused platform. AppOptics was too new to the game when we did the assessment.
As our Architects like to preach, don't find a product and then build your functional and technical requirements, build your requirements and then find the product that matches. New Relic offers a very nice blend of infrastructure, APM, web, and other services in a single user interface. I would definitely use them again.