Easy to start, hard to continue

We use New Relic for monitoring of websites, to get insights especially in errors, but also performance and latencies. There was initially some experimentation for other services as well, but the internal tools fulfilled those needs without the added costs of New Relic. The product as it is works well for the web use-case, but there are other competing offers out there.

Initially, a lot of our error reporting was handled by New Relic. As we've progressed, I find myself less and less willing to click around in the interface as it leads to calls and emails from sales. This is highly unfortunate, as it hampers your willingness to explore and find new features.

Moving fully to the cloud actually made us less reliant on New Relic, as a lot of out-of-the-box support usually comes when adopting a cloud-native approach. Also, to gain the most value, you'd need to run New Relic in all your layers, ranging from load balancers to databases and in-between.

We disabled the last new relic alert recently to instead rely on Grafana and other open-source products.