New Relic on the Front End
March 16, 2021
New Relic on the Front End
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
In our company, we use New Relic for both client and server side logging. We use both the out-of-the box tools and custom logging to keep track of app health. Most of my experience with it is using it to track logging and create dashboards for our front-end. Logging comes from JavaScript, and we use some of the built-ins to track page performance, etc.
- Dashboards are quite slick - there's a lot you can do and they look great in demos.
- Writing queries has a learning curve, but they're powerful once you learn them.
- Lot of documentation!
- There is a lot of documentation, but it is somewhat scattered, and the navigation is painful at times. I've often just navigated from a page and have to use the back button or my browser history to find it again.
- It would be great to have the documentation more organized by task (e.g. I'm a front-end developer who wants to implement custom JS logging, where do I begin).
- Environmental variables for dashboards! Grafana has this, it's great for when you're building a site in a test environment, but then want to be able to quickly update all your queries at once for the production environment. We've found workarounds, but they're hacky.
- I can't speak to this specifically as I'm just an end user, so I'll speak in terms of the impact on our team. We've used New Relic to monitor a new page we're still in the process of fully rolling out.
- It allows us to keep an eye on our overall page performance (several different metrics), JavaScript error rate, and other custom logging to make sure the new page is not having any significant downturns in these areas.
- By comparing these stats to the previous version of the page, we can feel confident in continuing to roll out the new page, and get early warning signs if something goes wrong.
- Our high priority alerts are tied in to OpsGenie so we get custom notifications off hours.
I think we are generally more confident in pushing out code changes knowing that we can benefit from alerts. We've also been able to do a better job routing alerts to the right people by integrating with Slack and OpsGenie.
Having dashboards to show the stats on our new properties has also been a great way to show stakeholders the technical side of our successes in a business-friendly and non-technical way.
Having dashboards to show the stats on our new properties has also been a great way to show stakeholders the technical side of our successes in a business-friendly and non-technical way.
Again, as an end user, I can't speak to this directly, however, I know our DevOps team highly recommends New Relic and is constantly encouraging teams to adopt it for logging and alerting. It is heavily used by our services to monitor stability among some of our most critical dependencies.