An SRE swiss army knife

New Relic is tightly integrated into our SDLC process and giving us feedback in not only how our application is performing, but how it is being used by our customers. Starting with onboarding our engineers can see how our application functions through our API calls, what services are used and how a request spans multiple services (both internally and externally). We can then use it in the application development phase in our lower level environments. Allowing engineers and QA easily identify errors or performance issues before it ever reaches our Production environment. Then finally in the Production environment, New Relic gives you an X-Ray machine into your application performance and monitoring. Understanding your transactions, where a bottleneck might lay within a specific API call because of a database call, or external call. The tool is used in every cycle of our SDLC for every engineer in our company. It is then heavily used by our SRE team for alerting and monitoring too.

This tool is heavily used by our SRE and engineering teams to know when our application is having issues and when scalability is of concern. We use it extensively in a 100% cloud environment in AWS. For any api call you can see a detailed breakdown of method calls, timing, how many times something was called, database calls, external calls. All in one single view for a quick diagnosis. Hands down makes debugging an application or performance issue much easier and a lot faster.

I can come into any new company have New Relic running and look at it and understand how the application works. Extremely powerful.

My experience has only been in 100% cloud environments and haven't used much of the cloud cost spend tools.

DevOps/SRE team has definitely benefited from New Relics monitoring and alerting capabilities. Integrating with tools like Pager Duty, Slack, and Email, we have severity policies setup and alerts configured in New Relic for all of our applications and services. New Relic dashboards, alerting, and instrumentation setup is part of our runbook for any new service created.

Also the addition of synthetics adds valuable alerting that can be scripted out.