A University's perspective on New Relic
Updated February 28, 2023
A University's perspective on New Relic
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
New Relic is being used by the University of South Australia (UniSA) Information Technology Unit to provide detailed insight into the end-user performance, availability, and error rate of the University's applications. The Unit supports critical systems that serve over 32,000 students.
- Detailed insight into application bottlenecks.
- Excellent instrumentation and customizable dashboards.
- Integration with other products (e.g. StatusPage and PagerDuty) to provide a versatile ecosystem.
- Vulnerability Management has been recently added, but lacks support for key development languages such as .NET and PHP. Supporting these would greatly assist our organisation.
- The MTTR is clearly faster as problems can be proactively identified and resolved quickly. This has an impact on the student and staff experience and reputation.
- Utilizing New Relic in a staging environment allows us to identify issues (that may have gone unnoticed) prior to deployment.
- Applications have been progressively enhanced through analysis of real end-user load times and errors.
New Relic provides a detailed monitoring solution that gives us insight into the various levels of the application stack including: - Database query. - Performance server performance and metrics application server. - Performance browser performance. - Error logging and aggregation. - Log data. Utilising the entire stack allows a data-rich view of our hundreds of consumer services, ensuring a good experience for our customers.
Our services/applications are primarily still on-premise and do not reside in the cloud.
Our organization has significantly benefitted from our DevOps integration with New Relic. New Relic gives us the confidence that we have had a successful deployment. Our development pipelines automatically add a deployment marker into New Relic to allow us to draw a line in the sand before and after the release. We also have tight integration with PagerDuty to be alerted to any issues immediately. Detailed SLA reports within New Relic provide valuable insight into weekly performance and Apdex scores. Our development cycles have been accelerated as we can deploy safely with the knowledge that we have a high-performing and stable product thanks to the use of New Relic in our staging environments.
Do you think New Relic delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with New Relic's feature set?
Yes
Did New Relic live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of New Relic go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy New Relic again?
Yes
Using New Relic
45 - New Relic is used predominantly by IT personnel in our central unit. These IT staff support applications and services used by all areas of our organisation, such as teaching, finance, HR and student support.
3 - New Relic essentially supports itself, but we have a few key people that are advanced New Relic users and assist other IT staff in using New Relic. The skills required include analytic skills, query writing (i.e. NRQL) for dashboards and reports, and staff that are familiar with the underlying systems that New Relic monitors.
- Application monitoring
- Transaction traces
- Integration with other related products (e.g. PagerDuty)
- Service Maps assist in the verification of our CMDB data
- The new Vulnerability Management will assist in identifying security concerns in our applications.
Evaluating New Relic and Competitors
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
Potentially trial multiple products to compare functionality between them.
New Relic Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal
New Relic Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support cares about my success | Need to explain problems multiple times |
Uncertain whether we have premium support, but I don't expect so. This hasn't been discussed with our Account Manager.
Yes - We are currently working through a bug that is impacting some of our services. This call is in progress.
Unable to recall a situation
Using New Relic
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- APM is very intuitive and the visuals are easy to interpret
- Dashboard creation is easy to undertake
- Service Maps are easy to visualise the application
- Alert policy creation can be difficult to use and I find is sometimes inaccurate
Yes - Works well and is very useful if urgent insight is required.