Observability Swiss Pocket Knife

We use New Relic for monitoring back-end / front-end performance and synthetic monitoring. It gives us insight using custom dashboards, connections to other services and gives teams opportunity to focus on their part as well as giving them insight on the whole. Also it gives us the alerting to pro-actively act on possible issues before they become problematic.

It has definitely helped us trace the root cause of certain problems on moments that issues were vague on the surface.

Actually, in a wider growing cloudscape these days, a monitoring tool is as good as its integration capabilities. Some of these New Relic does well, some are more of a challenge. Browser synthetics are as good as the browser version it uses, and New Relic isn't always up to speed with the current browser versions used on client computers of frameworks. It's very strong in the back-end, but complex website front-ends can make zooming in to some specific parts of a site a challenge while not losing sight on the whole. That said, this being a cloud solution absolutely helps availability, even outside working hours.

New Relic can help individual teams by providing them with their own dashboards, checks, insights and alerting for the applications they manage, as well as aligning them with the rest of the organisation.