New Relic's APM Feature Is a Game Changer For Ruby on Rails
March 31, 2022
New Relic's APM Feature Is a Game Changer For Ruby on Rails
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with New Relic
New Relic is primarily used for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Synthetic Monitoring. Their APM offering gives key insights into the health and performance of the company's web infrastructure. It is used to identify code bottlenecks, timeouts, and any requests or issues that are placing a heavy burden on the server. Additionally, it can be used to identify endpoints or requests that are causing poor customer experiences due to being slow or erroring. Synthetic Monitoring is used to evaluate whether certain functional features are working.
- Transaction Tracing.
- Aggregating Request Performance.
- Determining Source of Request Bottlenecks (Application or Database Layer).
- The interface can be overwhelming and similar features sometimes are partitioned into different sections.
- I wish transaction tracing had better, higher-level statistics about the number and frequency of database calls during a request.
- I wish the database section had views on total query volume, not just throughput or slow queries.
- It speeds up the identification and resolution of slow code, so developers don't have to comb through logs or do manual testing.
- Its synthetic monitoring features can quickly alert about key flow or transactions breaking so that functional downtime can be minimized.
- It gives the tools to maximize the customer experience when interacting with the site through its Apdex reports.
In the use case I am familiar with, New Relic was utilized on a Ruby on Rails application operating out of an Infrastructure as a Service stack. Because of that, New Relic's Application Performance Monitoring and Database Monitoring features were the most relevant for the infrastructure needs of the company because the other aspects of the stack were handled by the IaaS provider.
Because the organization that uses New Relic never had an on-prem installation, I can't comment on this particular question outside of the cost aspect. New Relic's APM seems to be very competitively priced and utilizing it has freed up engineering and product management resources to take on other tasks because identifying issues is very easy.
New Relic has made DevOps extremely efficient. It's very simple to analyze performance and infrastructure issues related to the application or the database. It also easily allows the team to identify sources of timeouts or poor Apdex performance. Additionally, its synthetic monitoring tool helps give great insights into the functioning of key flows on the site.
New Relic has a native integration with the IaaS service that the company utilizes which made it very easy to set up, integrate, and it also has consolidated billing with that IaaS service which is a big plus for the organization. After evaluating, I also thought it had the strongest APM capabilities compared to its competition.
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