Item: New Relic
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with New Relic

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

New Relic is used across engineering departments to monitor how systems operate in both non-prod and production environments. For the component that I own, I use it to monitor Tomcat health (like the number of thread pools) and monitor the latency/error rate of the requests that my service handles. This helps us to understand how our system behaves, how much our system can handle, and help in capacity planning. I also set up important alert signals based on New Relic data and route the signal to Pager Duty that we have engineers on a routine schedule to pick up those alerts when something unexpected happened in production. This helps to quickly mitigate production issues that can surface to end-users

Pros and Cons

Pros

Many important signals(for my case, signals related to the Tomcat server) come out of the box.
Dashboard is easy to set up and share among multiple department.
New Relic Query Language is simple and intuitive to use.

Cons

Dashboard doesn't provide parameterization capability. So if you need to create the same dashboard to capture metrics of different environments/ or hosts, you need to keep a copy and pasting the same dashboard again and again.
New Relic Query Language doesn't really support more complicated join operation between 2 (or more) types of signals (or it does support that, but in a convolute way). So, it's a hassle when you need to capture a more complicated signal.
If you span the timeframe in the dashboard to be too wide apart, the dashboard may be slow to load or even crash the browser.

Return on Investment

New Relic help lessen the time we need to set up our monitoring system.
It helps us to detect issue sooner and mitigate customer's complaint.
It help us to understand system load and anticipate/plan a change in resource.

Key Insights

Do you think New Relic delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with New Relic's feature set?

Yes

Did New Relic live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of New Relic go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy New Relic again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Postman, Splunk Enterprise, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

For a simple use case, like monitoring the overall server's health, New Relic will be well suited for this task as it required minimal configuration and many important signals already come out of the box. It also has New Relic Query Language which is a SQL-like language that is very easy and intuitive to use. This can be set up to capture a simple metric of your application however if your use case needs to capture somewhat more complicated metrics, you may need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do that in New Relic. The dashboard is easy to set up but it doesn't support parameterization from the user's input so you may need to do cut-and-paste to apply the same dashboard for all different environments/configurations that you interested in

Comments

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New Relic: Pros and Cons from real experience