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.
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.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
We’re able to deploy very quickly, not concerning ourselves with every single issue. In production we can address every issue.
What needs 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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I've never had to use technical support.
How was the initial setup?
Very straightforward. I don’t recall how it went, that’s how easy it was.
What other advice do I have?
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.
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Senior Software Systems Engineer - Digital Experience at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
It gives us one view over all our assets, and though I'd like to get more granular data, this may be coming in Insights.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helped us pin point the exact piece causing the performance bottleneck by using the transaction trace view.
IT Manager at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
No extra cost to the configuration and there is no daily charge for the product, because it saves analysis time.
Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Oct 28, 2013
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.
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."
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sharing their opinions.
Updated: May 2025
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Quick Links
Learn More: Questions:
- What are the pros/cons of AppDynamics, New Relic & CA Technologies?
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- Why use active and passive monitoring for a web site?
- Any advice about APM solutions?
- Dynatrace and New Relic: Room for improvement?
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- What Is The Biggest Difference Between Dynatrace and New Relic?
- Which monitoring solution is better - New Relic or Datadog?
- What do folks think about the newly launched New Relic One solution and its pricing model?
- When evaluating Application Performance Management, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?
