Very helpful, powerful and cost effective tool to make your applications faster and stable
March 03, 2020
Very helpful, powerful and cost effective tool to make your applications faster and stable
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
New Relic is configured at our main company website. It is used to view traffic load, CPU load, memory load, response time, latencies and errors. Since the website uses a very heavy back end, New Relic gives us detailed information regarding all processes that cause the most latency. We can then drill down to the heaviest processes and perform tweaks with surgical precision. This helped us to make the website at least 80% faster which we couldn't have done otherwise. After this period of tweaking, we did not use New Relic very often. In fact, I don't think it's very relevant for us right now.
- Drilling down into processes to code level.
- Detailed information regarding unhandled errors.
- Drilling down into code sometimes stops once you get to a point where you can't go any further.
- Client side load profiling is not always helpful.
- We've made our website at least 2 seconds faster on average.
- We're much faster responding to problems through alerts.
New Relic is quite powerful when it comes to "private" app performance. It is quite effortless in detecting problem is about any code library no mater how secured. Even with confuscated external party DLL's it can give a meaningful pointer to troublesome function calls. Same goes for database problems, I couldn't believe the detail it gives on database calls that I thought were securely hidden beyond access.
It sure reduced costs by giving insight into our slow and heavy website. But I don't see how that relates to cloud adoption at all. New Relic did reduce risk, by giving us a clean monitoring solution in combination with alerts that gave us the opportunity to jump in and fix things before anyone (read customers) would notice.
Alerts, dashboards, monitoring, in general, gives us the ability to jump in and fix the error before customers would notice. When a server goes down at 4 o'clock in the night, nowadays there will be someone notified and fix it. Before this, the problem would have been communicated by the customer feedback, which is very not good...
We're currently looking nto Microsoft Application Insight. I think Application Insights is much more powerful and easy to use since it gives us the opportunity to add logging and tracing in code. It also gives the opportunity to show realtime load (CPU, RAM, etc).
New Relic Feature Ratings
Using New Relic
4 - Developers, project manager and product manager keep a close watch on traffic and exceptions.Nowadays there is a thing called bots, that need to be addressed, and hence new relic get more attention.
2 - New Relic has it's own learning curve: you have to now your way around in its dashboards, graphs and options. Next to that skill set you need a developer background to understand web traffic, unhandled and handled exceptions, plus a good background in infrastructure to understand all server related info plus some databse background to understand database related trafiic and issues.
- Downtime
- traffic load
- bots accessing (and slowing down) our site
- Client side load times
- Not that much innovation here... all was expected. Maybe the ability to correlate issues to each other like downtime linked to database refreshing during night times.
- Correlational research
- Deeper down drilling in database activity
Evaluating New Relic and Competitors
- Product Features
- Product Usability
It did what it was supposed to do. Even more than that, since it really amazed us how much detail it would aggregate from our application regarding database, code, client side load etc.
I think I would have just rebuild the whole website... the fact that we needed New Relic in the first place says a lot about our website. All in all, I don't think you'd need more than a simple monitoring system, if your website/application is well written.