New Relic is a one-stop-shop for monitoring needs.
September 09, 2020
New Relic is a one-stop-shop for monitoring needs.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
Each engineering team within the organization has the opportunity to use whatever tools they feel will be most effective for their needs, however, New Relic is the primary tool the organization actively provides to users. There is strategic value in maintaining the majority of the organization's telemetry data within a single platform and New Relic provides 80%+ of the tools needed for most monitoring situations to gather that data.
- Variety of tools to meet the myriad needs of development teams and projects
- Robust support and community engagement, they are even willing to engage on a limited basis to help you instrument tools the right way.
- New platform pricing is now in place that makes all tools accessible to even smaller teams.
- They have so many tools that it's easy to get lost and confused.
- They have so much documentation and many tools are so flexible that it's easy for new users to become overwhelmed.
- Navigating Enterprise pricing negotiations can be very involved.
- Provides all the tools our engineers need in a single ecosystem, our engineers don't have to learn a variety of query languages or vendor-specific jargon to do their work.
- Engineers sometimes get overwhelmed by the variety and flexibility of tools. Clear use cases and paths to success would be helpful.
- Since all of our data is in one place, context switching when addressing issues is no longer an issue. We also don't suffer from the overhead of supporting our own data platform.
New Relic's variety of tools and basic agent installations have made it relatively simple for our developers to spin up new projects and get something in place for monitoring quickly and effectively. Our teams typically get a lot of value out of the data provided by whatever New Relic's various agents provide out of the box and when they reach the point that they need additional data, they can get that too because all of New Relic's tools are extensible enough to support custom monitoring patterns.
Our business primarily started in the cloud, so this hasn't been much of an issue. However, over the years, New Relic has done a lot of work to move from supporting monitoring servers to monitoring more virtual or serverless build outs. Where they once had a very hands off approach when it came to working with cloud vendors, largely just pulling from whatever logging metrics tool provided by the cloud platform, New Relic now has a much more partnership style relationship with at least AWS and are now supporting first party serverless, Kubernetes, and other virtualization first party tools and integrations.
Developing a simple and functional observability framework that can be easily consumed by development tools has been the primary responsibility for my team in our organization for the last year and will continue into the foreseeable future. New Relic has been one of the cornerstones in that strategy since they provide tools that satisfy most of the requirements from day one and they've always been more than willing to engage with individual development teams one-on-one to help them implement tools in the right way. With their guidance, our teams have been able to achieve a high level of observability while still remaining focused on providing our customers value instead of becoming experts in tooling, which is not our core competency as an organization.
We find it important to frequently (yearly) re-evaluate the efficacy of the toolset we provide to our organization to ensure we're meeting engineering needs and staying informed about the latest trends. Each year, New Relic keeps coming out on top. When new technology comes on the scene, New Relic is almost always already working on tools to gather insights. Docker and Kubernetes is a great example of this. I've been using New Relic since before the use of these tools was widespread, so I remember when they didn't have tools to support them. Then, just as I started learning more about these tools, New Relic was proactively reaching out to learn about our strategies to adopt them and provide us with the opportunity to provide feedback into efforts they already had in progress to address those new technology stacks.