The thing I use the most is the ability to tell at a glance that we’re in a red state. We have dashboards around our office which let me know what I need to pay attention to. I can dig into the error. It also has high throughput.
SQA Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Mean time to recovery has improved, leading to cost savings, though the data collection on it is not a long enough period of time if I want to see trends beyond seven days.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
Mean time to recovery has improved, leading to cost savings and reduced customer dissatisfaction.
What needs improvement?
One of my issues was with not getting enough insight into errors, as I can only go back seven days. The data collection on it is not a long enough period of time if I want to see some trends. If someone is having some errors, I can’t get historical insight.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We had a problem where our application crashed because of New Relic. They acknowledged the problem and we just had to turn it off for six months.
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It’s been scaling along with our growth.
How are customer service and support?
Great tech support, very responsive. Have helped us solve problems.
How was the initial setup?
I wasn't involved.
What other advice do I have?
It’s just so easy to set up and use with little training. The barrier to entry is extremely low and it adds a high-value.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

SQA Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
As a QA manager, it helps me to know exactly where to focus our attention because we can pinpoint specifically where there may be issues. I'd like alerts for custom queries.
Valuable Features
We primarily have an API so our front-end apps aren’t a huge part of our business, but Browser allows us to see geo-location to see where requests are coming from.
It also provides us with really valuable information such as which different browsers and versions our website visitors are using.
Improvements to My Organization
As a QA manager, it helps me to know exactly where to focus our attentions because we can pinpoint specifically where there may be issues -- where geographically, which browsers, which browser versions, and other very granular details.
Room for Improvement
I'd like to see alerting based on custom insight queries. If I set a custom query to give me some value, I want to be able to set an alert for that.
Deployment Issues
No issues with deployment at all.
Stability Issues
No stability issues.
Scalability Issues
It’s been scaling along with our growth.
Customer Service and Technical Support
I haven't had to use technical support.
Initial Setup
Setup was very simple and straightforward.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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Director of IT/Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Implementing it with our app servers gave us visibility into our Java code and JVMs during user issues. Yet, Synthetics would be more useful if it didn't have to learn another analytics language.
What is most valuable?
The APM Transaction monitoring is the most valuable feature. Being able to define key transactions and collect traces has been essential to providing actionable data for fixes and improvements.
How has it helped my organization?
Early in our app lifecycle we would receive random reports of slow response times from users. Of course, they were never reproducible in our QA environments nor did our OS-specific monitoring tools show any problems. Implementing the APM with our app servers gave us visibility into what our Java code and JVMs were doing at the time users had problems. This allowed us to zero in on infrastructure and code issues as well as implement monitoring cases specific to our app.
What needs improvement?
Last year, there were several New Relic outages where alerts were either fired in error or not fired at all. These have been remedied over the last year, but it negatively impacted our trust in using New Relic as our sole source of analysis and alerting.
As far as suggested improvements, the Synthetics module could be much more useful if one did not have to learn yet another analytics query language.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used New Relic in production since mid-2013.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Since we use a 1.x version of Play Framework, there were some initial challenges in implementing the Java APM agent. The later versions of the agent have drastically improved since then and deployments are considerably less cumbersome.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The aforementioned outages and issues were vexing but, fortunately, are well in the past.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No issues encountered.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Generally excellent.
Technical Support:Generally excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
New Relic was an add-on to our existing operations analytics systems. We selected New Relic solely on the basis of the application monitoring feature which our existing systems did not provide.
How was the initial setup?
Once we overcame the challenges of implementing the early Java agent, the remainder of the implementation was effortless. We had 90% functionality within the first 12 hours of implementation.
What about the implementation team?
I performed the implementation personally.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
At our usage level, the cost has been trivial compared to our overall operations monthly costs. What the product has done for us was expedite our ability to discover actionable data that led directly to improvements in our app which would have taken considerable longer if we'd had to build similar functionality ourselves.
Whilst it may be tempting to instrument all of your production and non-production environments, this is a tool that is best used where appropriate, rather than as a blanket deployment.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated building similar functionality ourselves using open source JVM monitoring and log analysis tools. We also evaluated a few semi-competitors. The home-brewed solution would have required additional engineering staff and a much longer build time. The also-ran services were astronomically more expensive.
What other advice do I have?
It's a great tool for monitoring infrastructure and application performance. The only drawbacks have been cost and a few issues with outages and monitoring/alerting failures.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Director of Corporate and Software Development at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
It gives us instant feedback on incidences causing the biggest performance hits. However, alerts for alerting the appropriate people when something goes wrong are not quite there yet.
What is most valuable?
I think the downtime alerts as well as the insight into performance killers from database queries are the most valuable feature for us.
How has it helped my organization?
I think that we didn’t have much insight into which things were causing the biggest performance hits, so it gave us instant feedback on incidents which may have caused users enough pain.
What needs improvement?
They have integrated alert and performance monitoring which they’re rolling out as a beta now. A lot of the features for application monitoring and uptime, and alerts for alerting the appropriate people when something goes wrong are not quite there yet.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We’ve never had any problems whatsoever.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It’s been useful as we’ve grown our user base; we haven’t had any scalability issues. We’ve done tens of thousands rather than tens of millions of transactions.
How are customer service and technical support?
I’ve only used it a couple of times. They escalated the issues appropriately and it always seemed like someone who understood the issue jumped on the ticket, and we’ve had the issued resolved in a timely fashion.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were previously using nothing else. We were reading through logs trying to interpret our own data, which was challenging. Someone suggested New Relic and we went with it right after; they’re the only player in town for this sort of environment.
How was the initial setup?
The initial ground level setup was very easy, very intuitive, and went very quickly. Some of the more advanced features did require a lot of review of their documentation and a few support tickets to figure out.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I think documentation is probably key for us, and then support. Reputation and long-term relationship doesn’t matter so much if they have a good product. For this product we didn’t really have a viable alternative. We couldn’t find anybody else who did something similar.
What other advice do I have?
We’re very satisfied with it. We had a little difficulty plugging in some more of the advanced features. It’s so big and so complex, but New Relic does invest in education.
This is the best tool for gaining insight into SaaS or cloud-based applications that we’ve seen. Unless you’re going to roll your own solution, you pretty much have to use them.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
IT Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
It gives us enough knowledge to know where to improve things on the database side, although sometimes it requires too much drilling down to find out about a problem.
Valuable Features
It gives us insight into several areas--
- Where slowdowns are,
- Which of our customers is hitting us most, and
- If there’s an application issue on the database side, how long a query takes.
Improvements to My Organization
It gives us enough knowledge to know where to improve things on the database side, or to make improvements in the application logic.
Room for Improvement
I don't have any suggestions for improvements, but we think sometimes it’s too difficult to get more details about a problem. Sometimes it requires too much drilling down to find out about a problem for which we shouldn't need to do so much searching.
Deployment Issues
No problems whatsoever with deploying APM.
Stability Issues
It seems pretty stable, although there are times when it is not available.
Scalability Issues
Seems to be pretty good on scalability and it’s easy to install into our applications.
Customer Service and Technical Support
We haven’t had any issues needing to involve their technical support.
Initial Setup
It was already in the environment when I joined, but I can't imagine that setup would have been anything but straightforward.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
DevOps Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
It's helped with a lot of troubleshooting of performance issues and with code problems, where we deploy something and it's performing slowly.
Valuable Features:
The most valuable feature for us is the ability to see what is going on with the apps on our web server. We can monitor the response times, throughput, what transactions are fast or slow, and what's being hit more than others.
Improvements to My Organization:
In the past, we had to look at server metrics such as CPU and the number of connections. With APM, we can see much more about what it's doing. It's helped with a lot of troubleshooting of performance issues. It's also helped with code problems, where we deploy something and it's performing slowly. It helps us see the problem in the web app, database, rendering, etc.
Deployment Issues:
We've had no issues with deployment.
Stability Issues:
We encountered no issues with instability.
Scalability Issues:
It scaled well, as we just need to add a new agent onto the box when we add a server. Also, it's been helpful in determining when we need to scale up by looking at the metrics.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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