Item: New Relic
Rating: 9
Author: Piyush Goel

Overall Satisfaction with New Relic

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Infrastructure Monitoring and Alerting Application Performance Monitoring and Alerting Tracking business and product related KPI's and metrics. Dashboards for NOC and the customer facing teams. New Relic is the de-facto KPI tracking and dash-boarding tool for us. Apart from the APM - which is the USP of New Relic - even the technical and product KPIs are plotted on New Relic. It is used the tool for handshake and exchange of data between the various groups within the organisation.

Pros and Cons

Pros

APM tool has an extensive coverage across various programming languages, and frameworks.
Scales pretty well without any issues. The agents are lightweight and easy to upgrade and deploy.
The Apdex based alerts are quite accurate and act like trustable guardians to anything going off-track in the system.
The AI-Ops feature is also impactful, although it's expensive.

Cons

The tools to monitor usage, and optimise are poor. Since they have moved to consumption based pricing, it's important for users to track the places where wastage is happening (Users not logging in the system, data points from services that are not read from queries, etc).
The AI tools should have smarter capabilities to track the lineage of an anomaly and help pin-point to the exact source of any error.
The new pricing model works best for consumer facing companies where the end-end stack can be used. For B2B companies where the UI components are not that heavy, the pricing is prohibitive beyond a certain point.
The Log Management tool has the challenge of extra cost that is incurred while transferring the logs to the New Relic.

Return on Investment

It has helped deliver our Uptimes and Stability commitments to our customers. The Apdex based alerts, APM tools allow us to provide a stable product to the customers. We went from 99.5% to 99.95% over 2 years.
Good data driven culture has been enforced within the group. The engineering and product teams can hold each other accountable on the quality of their delivery.
Reduce costs of the infra as right efficiencies can be brought into the codebase, and the application instead of throwing more hardware to the system. Costs reduced by ~10-15% over 2 years.
Able to bring in a culture of Observability driven development.

New Relic Real-Time Monitoring

New Relic instrumentation is available on all platforms and modules (mobile apps, web apps, servers). Through the end-end instrumentation, we could create a complete picture of the user journeys, and capture the experience. This allowed us to identify the exact problems faced by our users, and prioritize our efforts accordingly.

New Relic Migration

Our use-cases are primarily cloud based. However, we rely on them heavily during migration to and from regions, and across the cloud providers. Their tool is cloud agnostic, and allows us to track the health and the performance of our applications in a predictable manner. The costs are controlled as all the performance bottlenecks can be tracked and fixed at the source instead of adding more infrastructure.

New Relic DevOps

Yes, our DevOps team is able to track the health and the performance of our systems and services accurately without too much effort. In fact, with the usage of New Relic we have been able to move the work of system operations to the development team. We are truly on the path of Shift-left.

Alternatives Considered

Datadog

New Relic's APM is better than Datadog's. It has better traces and dashboards. The Apdex-based alerts are accurate and work predictably even at a large scale. However, New Relic can become expensive as the volume of data ingested grows. Datadog has better dashboards and cross-service maps. We selected New Relic because of its better APM capabilities and our team's ease of usage.

Update: In recent years, pricing isn't a huge differentiator anymore. Most Observability platforms are priced similarly.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch

Likelihood to Recommend

Well Suited Works well for elastic demand on the infrastructure - scaling up/down works seamlessly. Architectures that need APM, metrics (application and infrastructure) together. This gives the best value of their products. UI Monitoring capabilities still need work. Less Suited Architectures that already have tools like Prometheus configured. The value for New Relic won't shine in such use-cases. If the volumes of data transmitted to New Relic exceed 5-10TB per day. The costs will exorbitant in such scenarios.

Using New Relic

Users and Roles

100 - Technology and Customer Support. These two functions have visibility to the systems and need real-time insights into the operability aspects of the software.

Support Headcount Required

2 - New Relic is a self-serve tool with easy-to-navigate UIs and descriptive workflows. It's easy to get started. However, some technical knowledge is needed to configure the tool for organizational use. The roles and the associated accesses have to be provisioned, dashboards need to be created, and appropriate alerts have to be set-up to derive full value from the tool.

Business Processes Supported

Alerting on the SLO breaches.
Operations Dashboards for the customer support groups.
Application Performance Monitoring
Tracing and troubleshooting.

Future Planned Uses

Providing access to the Customer Success team to ensure the stability conversations can be done with the clients with complete data.

Likelihood to Renew

Happy with the product. However, pricing and costs are a concern. If the latter is addressed during the contract renewal, we would be happy to commit to a longer-duration contract.

Evaluating New Relic and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - We had our in-house O11Y stack built on ELK. It was a hassle just managing that stack, and not worth out time. New Relic replaced it seamlessly with minimal effort.

Key Differentiators

Scalability
Ease of Use

Ease of Use was the primary decision driver. We used New Relic in trial mode for 3 months and then decided to purchase the license. Most of our developers were able to onboard the tool without any assistance. The New Relic solutions architect also conducted a workshop for us that addressed all the doubts, and concerns the team had.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

As the O11Y space has evolved, new constructs and modes of instrumentation have sprung up such as wide-events, and AI-based alerts. We would want to evaluate the entire spectrum before deciding.

New Relic Implementation

Implementation Rating

It's straightforward as New Relic provides SDK and agents for most platforms and frameworks. The integration is largely plug-and-play. The primary challenge is designing the metrics to emit from the system.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled

Implementation Issues

Instrumenting our code with the APM agents.
Designing the correct metrics.

New Relic Support

Support Rating

The support team has been really helpful and resolved most of the issues on time. However, for a couple of issues, several follow-ups were needed to elicit a reasonable response. The issue was deeply technical and could have been investigated only by their Architects, and bringing them into the ticket took longer than needed.