Item: New Relic
Rating: 7
Author: Sergiu Cazac

Overall Satisfaction with New Relic

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are self-hosting our app and its microservices and db on Hetzner VPS so naturally we needed a tool to monitor the servers' health, including memory, CPU, storage as well as nginx and php-fpm performance, MySQL replication monitoring, and more.

The 2 main use cases are:
1. Get alerts when something is wrong and react to them
2. Use the historical data to investigate ongoing or past issues

Pros and Cons

Pros

Server health monitoring
Historical data for in-depth invesigation
Alerts (Slack, email, etc. based on rules)

Cons

Pricing structure
UI (it looks good, but very easy to get lost with lots of layers of info)
Ability to easier data selection of what data we need to collect and store

Return on Investment

While initial setup seems quick, I still had to spent lots of time to configure it to work, which I expected to be easier
A little unpredictable pricing

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds Pingdom and Grafana

Solarwinds was good until they migrated to a new kind of offering and discounting the old product making it more expensive and less flexible for our specific use-case.
The free trial also helped me try and get started without needing to commit.
I think right now New Relic is the best option out there, even though not perfect.

Key Insights

Do you think New Relic delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

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

Slack, Hetzner IaaS, Buddy

Likelihood to Recommend

1. Monitoring server health - make sure New Relic tracks all necessary metrics and reports on them so the DevOps team can act on them and fix them timely so there are no downtimes or unexpected surprises.
2. Monitoring MySQL, nginx, and php-fpm metrics, to make sure web apps work correctly.
3. Investigating performance issues in production (easier said than done but New Relic gives you the tools).

Comments

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Very powerful solution for infra monitoring that doesn't keep you up at night