From simple APM summaries to complex investigations, for me New Relic is an essential Ops tool

Australia Post uses New Relic across many departments as an Application Performance Monitoring tool. The dashboards, monitoring and alerting systems are invaluable to us for swiftly detecting production incidents, and equally important in helping diagnose complex issues in a variety of ways. Personally I find the summary screen for an asset provides a great overview, giving throughput, error rate, and response time data at a glance for the time period of interest, and at a range of percentiles. If more in depth diagnosis is required, I head to the transactions screen, where I can see a breakdown of data by transaction type, or the errors screen which helps isolate the code causing an issue and even provides stack traces.

From an operational support point of view, New Relic provides the ability to detect and resolve issues rapidly, from common, mundane problems, through to devious and subtle intermittent problems, the tools are there to support us. Higher uptime and quality of service translates into better outcomes for customers and therefore for the business.

We build and operate an extensive fleet of microservices. This can be demanding, at each of development, systems automation, and operational levels. We need detailed information on what is going wrong, where, and why, and we need to know quickly. New Relic delivers these abilities and this has enabled us to prove the value of the investment to management, and proven results have reduced anxiety about cloud adoption, resulting in swifter adoption, which has in turn unlocked benefits to the business in improved speed-to-market and cost-to-serve.

The New Relic dashboards, monitoring and alerting features are absolutely mission critical for operational support in our large and complex systems. We'd be in major trouble without these abilities. For example we've been able to detect and measure industrial bot scraping activity, and our strategy to deal with this threat has been largely informed by information gathered from New Relic. I wouldn't say that New Relic has been particularly useful in accelerating development cycles however.