Item: New Relic
Rating: 8
Author: Jim Locke, ITIL v3F, ITIL RCV

Overall Satisfaction with New Relic

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it for monitoring of systems, in the MS Azure environment. It's being user by at least 2 divisions here, and so far, it has provided good insight into where performance bottlenecks, and related errors are.

Pros and Cons

Pros

New Relic Synthetics - seems to do a good job, to monitor specific URLs, with criteria.
New Relic One - is a good centralized "hub" for all of the New Relic products , applications, and devices we have set up.
New Relic Infra - Provided good insight into the Infrastructure, and dashboarding ability.

Cons

It would be helpful if use cases for particularly a Windows installation, were provided to help determine which set of configuration files would be the one a group would want to control. I.e. potentially with a department trying to do DevOps, it's difficult to determine which team needs to have responsibility for what at times. The reason I mention this, is New Relic seems to in many ways be a tool that's useful for DevOps-related processes and staff.
On the main New Relic One site, sometimes a refresh option is available for new features. It would be helpful to see what the new features are in advance before trying this out. Particularly if doing a demo or a working season with another team.
I'm not aware of a page or specific site which describes/summarizes all of the different NR Products and their features.
Sometimes it's tricky to determine which product to use to accomplish a task.

Return on Investment

It has helped us narrow focus on our platform, to help determine some of the key problem areas.
It might still be too early to determine if, for our team's needs, if the price for NR justifies the benefits. Often when developers have availability, they are often able to put fixes in, and make certain routines more efficient. The question is, is it better to have someone use a tool to help determine this, or have technical experts look at the code.
Potentially a negative or positive for ROI, NR has sort of brought our team's to a new level of understanding of how complex our platform is, and how some adjustments for the future could help us deploy more often with perhaps less moving pieces.

Other Software Used

Octopus Deploy, Jira Software, Tempo Budgets for Jira

Likelihood to Recommend

For monitoring specific URLs for response time, tracking performance of an application over time, and being able to drill down to the function level where an app component might be experiencing an issue, it seems to be well suited.
Also, the overall NR suite seems to experience rapid changes, which could potentially be somewhat unsettling to users who are trying to get familiar with a feature area. I'm unsure also, how consistently these are documented.

It seems to have less ability them some other products, to be able to see what low-level procedures on the code or DB side could be bottlenecks.

Comments

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Very nice and powerful software