Best APM solution for full-stack web developers

I primarily use New Relic's APM product to find the cause of slow-running PHP apps. The transaction tracer allows me to drill down to individual function calls to find bottlenecks, fix them and then verify the results using deployment tracking. The database query and external services logging also helps me keep track of any performance drains.

Everything can be viewed in New Relic so it's a one-stop location for all our monitoring - server infrastructure performance and utilisation, Docker container status and performance, server software logs, client-side browser performance, and application performance monitoring. Having all of these details and metrics in one location makes it easy to see patterns in performance changes and have a full view of our entire stack.

Our devs were used to the old school methods of SSHing into a server and looking at log files, or using shell programs to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues. The abstraction of serverless solutions makes this difficult, and New Relic was able to provide a much better replacement for these practices that translated seamlessly to cloud serverless architecture.

New Relic's deployment tracking, and the ability to compare performance before and after a deployment and track trends in error levels and performance changes by deployment, makes it quick and easy to see if a deployment is causing errors or performance issues and should be rolled back, or to see if a deployment has resolved an issue. This allows our team to make urgent deployments at short notice with confidence.