Ease of installation/maintenance.
Sr Application Ops Engineer at a tech company with 201-500 employees
Makes it easier to troubleshoot application issues. Administratively, it's really easy since it's a SaaS application.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
Makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot application issues.
For how long have I used the solution?
1.5 years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We use a deployment solution so after we set it up once we could package up the deployment and go from there. Administratively, it's really easy since it's an SaaS application.
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New Relic
May 2024
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Haven't encountered as issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Haven't encountered as issues with scalability.
How are customer service and support?
Customer Service:
Excellent.
Technical Support:Excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I had not used another solution. Others in the company have. Switch was due to feature set, ease of use, and less administrative overhead.
How was the initial setup?
I had to read the instruction page but other than that, it's easy.
What about the implementation team?
We did not implement through a vendor.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I do not know. The licenses were purchased and I installed Java and server agents.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I was not involved in the choice/purchase of this product.
What other advice do I have?
Have your dev team read the information about the product: it's capabilities and how to implement them. That will help a lot in the long run.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Sales Engineer at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
I loved using this product.
What is most valuable?
Monitoring, Custom Dashboards
How has it helped my organization?
New Relic gave us a quick, easy way to monitor our web application for all of our systems. This changed how and what we responded to.
What needs improvement?
I would like better alerting. I also would like to see a bit more detailed information. Though I was happy with the detail I did get.
For how long have I used the solution?
2 years
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No, deployment was easy.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
None
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
None
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had several solutions in-house.
How was the initial setup?
This was a simple setup. I never received training and I was able to get in to the admin console and set up the dashboards I wanted.
What about the implementation team?
In-house
What other advice do I have?
Get over the SaaS security concerns.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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New Relic
May 2024
Learn what your peers think about New Relic. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2024.
771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Use New Relic like a Pro
Introduction
New Relic has become an industry standard for web applications performance measurement in Rails community. Simply adding and configuring newrelic_rpm gem for your Rails application gives you a great overview of its performance with an adequate level of details.
There are still a few improvements you can do to make use of some cool
and extremely useful features of New Relic monitoring. They will help
you to save time and efforts when fixing performance issues, scaling
application, refactoring, etc.
So what should you do to make fast and effective use of New Relic?
Record your deploys
Always
record deploys with your capistrano or chief scripts. This will save
you time when looking for reasons for performance improvements or
drawbacks.
A detailed information about recording deploys using capistrano can be found in
official documentation. You can also use simple API deployment notification described here.
Either way it is important to add a clear description of deploy along with a tag or branch name.
Note that Pro users can also see ‘Change report’ for each deploy with a detailed overview of performance metrics changes (response time, throughput, apdex etc.).
Setup additional metrics before you start
It is important to setup some additional custom metrics right after configuring and enabling New Relic
before you have experienced performance issues. You can read more about custom metrics collection here.
While you can add traces to almost any method in your code, they are
commonly used for tracking important/critical parts of your code. We
strongly recommend you to add traces for:
- application critical parts of code;
- external services communication (redis, RPCs, external APIs, DNS resolve etc.);
- encoding/decoding methods (some json encode methods implementations can be slow for large objects).
These traces are useful even within internal network. Drawbacks may be caused by network lags or hosting provider problems.
Here are some useful examples of custom traces that you can easily add to your initialisation pipeline (e.g. application.rb).
Resque
Resque.add_method_tracer :enqueue
Resolv::DNS
Resolv::DNS.add_method_tracer :open
Resolv::DNS.class_eval {add_method_tracer :getresources}
Redis
Redis.class_eval {add_method_tracer :set}
Redis.class_eval {add_method_tracer :get}
Redis.class_eval {add_method_tracer :sadd}
Redis.class_eval {add_method_tracer :lpop}
Redis.class_eval {add_method_tracer :rpush}
Redis::Connection.class_eval {add_method_tracer :read}
Redis::Connection.class_eval {add_method_tracer :write}
Redis::Connection.class_eval {add_method_tracer :connect}
Setting up additional metrics have two main goals:
- measuring performance of specific parts of code;
- when investigating slow requests with a lot of ‘Application code’ segments these additional traces can be used as benchmarks.
Additional metrics will give you more detailed view of what and when is going on in your application.
Note: New Relic gem implementation already has traces for Net::HTTP
methods.
Caution: Don’t be zealous on adding custom metrics, clean obsolete ones.
Collecting too many metrics can impact the performance of your
application. It is strongly recommended to keep the total number of
custom metrics under 2000.
Setup Server Monitoring
To look beyond application itself New Relic has introduced Server Monitoring tool.
It is critically important to setup Server Monitoring for all servers
in production and even staging hosting scheme. It will help you to
measure your environment performance and state.
Note. New Relic is including Server Monitoring for free for every subscription level.
You can find all required information about installation and configuration of Server Monitoring tool
here.
Setup custom views and dashboards
In most cases application
performance strongly depends on application state and users activity. It
is also helpful to see how your application performance correlates with
business metrics, database activity, internal services state etc. New
Relic gives you an opportunity to setup custom metrics, group and
organise them with views and dashboards.
Common useful custom metrics you should define for your applications are:
- number of active users;
- users activity metrics;
- number of active application’s core entities (e.g. active tables for poker application);
- number of connections/calls for internal/external services (some have specific thresholds);
- database additional metrics.
Official documentation will help you to find more about creating and managing custom views and custom dashboards.
You can collect any custom metric and setup a specific custom
view/dashboard in order to have general view on how they correlate.
Along with monitoring, custom dashboards and views also:
- helps you to understand the reason of performance changes;
- gives you a vision of future load changes depending on custom metrics;
- provides an ability to predict critical thresholds for load values (e.g. active users);
- helps you to improve application architecture by showing bottlenecks of internal infrastructure.
Note: The Custom Dashboards feature is available with New Relic Pro and higher.
It is useful to track only those custom metrics that have impact on overall application performance.
Setup background jobs/tasks monitoring
Always trace your background jobs performance. While in most cases they doesn’t directly impact on server response time they still can impact on user’s feedback and overall application performance.
Currently the Ruby agent supports only
Delayed::Job
and Resque
.
Read more about monitoring Ruby background processes and daemons
here. Make sure you have enabled and configured everything correctly.
Within one of our products we have employed an actor based architecture where actual action is executing asynchronously in a separate thread (we use JRuby). In such complex cases, it is useful to add traces for these actions and mark them as real web transactions (controller actions).
To complete such tasks or customise your
add_method_tracer
options please check API documentation.
For more detailed information about available options please read
perform_action_with_newrelic_trace
API documentation here. The most important options of tracer methods are:
- :category — defines action type (available options: [:controller, :task, :rack, :uri]);
- :name — action name (will be used as last part of metric name);
- :params — call context parameters;
- :class_name — first part of metric name. Default is a current class.
Here is a small example of custom background task implementation using JRuby thread actors.
ApplicationController
:
def enqueue_task(opts={})
job_params = {
class_name: "Scheduler::#{self.class.name}",
name: params[:action],
params: params
}
Scheduler.enqueue(job_params) {yield}
end
Scheduler::WorkerActor:
//job_params are stored in job.params after enqueue
def process_job(job)
perform_action_with_newrelic_trace(job.params) do
run_job(job)
end
end
So in this case all enqueued tasks and controller actions appear in ‘Web transactions’ together.
Summary
New Relic is a solid monitoring solution, especially for Rails developers.
Make sure you have enabled and configured all basic features described in this article.
And moreover — always learn your tools.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Cloud Solution Architect at FCamara
Stable with a good VPN and very easy to set up
Pros and Cons
- "The VPN is one of the solution's most valuable features for us."
- "The older view is much better than the new view that they have. We'd like to go back to that previous version. The user interface just isn't as nice as it used to be."
What is our primary use case?
We primarily use the solution for watching user behavior, among other use cases.
What is most valuable?
The VPN is one of the solution's most valuable features for us.
We like that we have the ability to view users and speculate.
The initial setup is very easy.
What needs improvement?
The older view is much better than the new view that they have. We'd like to go back to that previous version. The user interface just isn't as nice as it used to be.
The solution does not seem to be lacking any features. I can't say that I recommend any specific features for the next release.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for about 2 months, more or less. It hasn't been too long just yet.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of the solution has been good for us so far. We don't have any problems with it. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We've found the scaling to be good. If a company needs to expand it, it should be able to do so without any problems.
Currently, we have four or five people using the solution. Our company, however, works for my customers, and therefore we have a lot of ongoing projects.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support has been good so far. That said, we haven't really had any technical issues either. We're satisfied with the level of service we've received so far.
How was the initial setup?
We didn't find the initial setup complex. The implementation was straightforward and simple.
The deployment was pretty quick as well. It might have taken us one to two hours to get everything done.
What other advice do I have?
We're just customers. We're end-users. We don't have a business relationship with the company.
I would recommend the solution to other organizations. We've had a good experience with it so far.
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the solution at a ten. It's pretty much perfect for our purposes.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Dëvóps Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Wonderful product
APM products are something that needs to be well-tailored to your specific needs and environment. for the project i'm currently working on, we chose new relic after a bakeoff with another vendor. both products were great, but new relic came up on top and we've been very happy with the insights it provides.
This review assumes one is familiar with APM and will not cover the basic benefits of New Relic as an APM product.
Strong points:
New Relic was very easy to deploy and had minimal impact on our environments. Visibility was near-total out of the box and support was extremely helpful in adding the missing instrumentation into the product.
New Relic supports a good mix of environments which is important to us as we work with several languages.
Support for background tasks is also an important feature for us which is usually not as well-covered in other products.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Lead Software Architrect at a retailer with 51-200 employees
We’re able to deploy very quickly, not concerning ourselves with every single issue, but it’s a little sluggish going around getting down to the last dirty details of a session.
Valuable Features
We’re able to see real-time sessions come through. We talk directly to customers as they’re having issues with the site, and we can pull up their email addresses and see what issues they have. For customer support and engineering, it’s crucial.
Improvements to My Organization
We’re able to deploy very quickly, not concerning ourselves with every single issue. In production we can address every issue.
Room for Improvement
There may be issues with scalability with individual users sending events up to the cloud.
Also, it’s a little sluggish getting down to the last dirty details of a session. It’s tough to do, admittedly, but that’s what I’d wish for.
Stability Issues
It’s very, very reliable, no issues, and most importantly we haven’t lost any data and we’ve been able to hotlink particular events. All our documentation about particular events, we can always go back and see, which is good for training.
Scalability Issues
There have been issues, but I do wonder whether we’ll have to tailor the user experience and whether we’ll reach bottlenecks with individual clients sending events up to the cloud.
Customer Service and Technical Support
I've never had to use technical support.
Initial Setup
Very straightforward. I don’t recall how it went, that’s how easy it was.
Other Advice
Just install it. It provides so much more than alerting of errors.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Lead Software Architrect at a retailer with 51-200 employees
It gives us a good digest of how the system is behaving and being able to diagnose any issues, though I'd like more granularity in the charts.
Valuable Features
Stack traces are the most valuable feature for us. We have a monolithic stack and just having a single place to get product track traces is incredibly valuable. We use all the charts and graphs, but it all comes down to getting stack traces to see how code is flowing.
Improvements to My Organization
We’re able to address events immediately. We have very good uptime and customer retention. So it’s all about giving them the best customer experience. It gives us a good digest of how the system is behaving and being able to diagnose any issues.
Room for Improvement
I’m into very dense charts, and I think the charts used throughout APM are a little low resolution in terms of time points across the X axis. I'd like more granularity.
Stability Issues
Used to be fairly slow, but it’s gotten a lot faster. It's industry-leading, the most responsive full suite of tools that I’ve used.
Scalability Issues
We’ve been able to brainlessly scale.
Customer Service and Technical Support
We've never had to use it.
Implementation Team
We set it up through Heroku.
Other Advice
Install it. Doesn’t take up any extra resources or any time to install.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Software Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees
It saves time and engineering resources in terms of making things faster and diagnoses problems. Once in a while the data is delayed on the graph, but that only happens every month or two.
Valuable Features:
The main APM page with the graphs. We leave that up on our wall and we can tell pretty quickly if something is about to go wrong, or if the response time slows down. Database queries are really helpful as they helps to figure out where the low hanging fruit is in terms of making the site faster on the database site.
I use key transactions a lot when I’m tweaking the resources for the site. There are certain transactions that I care about more than the rest.
I use the throughput numbers a lot, especially working on workers as opposed to web. If I’m going to add more workers, first I want to know if there will be a bottleneck somewhere.
Improvements to My Organization:
It saves time and engineering resources in terms of making things faster and diagnoses problems. For us, engineering uses it but no one else even knows what it is. Overall, it improves the experience of the customers and site users.
Stability Issues:
It’s pretty solid. Sometimes they have downtime – for the most part the New Relic site is up all the time, but once in a while the data is delayed on the graph (like every month or two), but other than that it works!
Scalability Issues:
It’s scalable – thumbs up. We turn on new servers and New Relic just works.
Initial Setup:
It was already in production when I joined.
Other Advice:
All the information is there, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what it means. You have to have used it a number of times in order to understand where to look. It doesn’t tell you the whole story, it just gives you pieces.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: I used to work for New Relic.
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Updated: May 2024
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