New Relic is a good mix of a fully supported platform and allowing you to get your hands dirty

We use it for logging, some traces, and a few synthetic checks. We have tied it into our Open Telemetry framework and it has helped us start to understand our tech stack better. Business problems we have addressed with New Relic are specific to finding slow web service calls, detecting errors, and seeing latency in real time.

We have been able to tie into their platform from any data source in any location and it has allowed us to see good maps of how our systems talk to each other. Their UI provides helpful guidance on missing visibility and integrations that we should look into adding to the platform.

New Relic has helped us with understanding our scaling needs a little better than we had with tools that we built ourselves. Their dashboarding and UI has been easy to adopt and their documentation is thorough on how to integrate and use their specific query languages. They have also added some AI capabilities that has helped with writing queries.

Yes, we have created many plug and play dashboards and have been able to reference them in real-time during incidents with easy to understand monitoring and integrations with our external monitoring and alerting solutions. We do a lot of stress and capacity testing and have been able to watch the dashboards we have created in real-time to see how increased traffic impacts the websites we are testing. We have also been able to implement their browser agent in some cases to provide high level observability metrics, albeit with a bit of a generic feel to the data it returns to us.