My organization follows SOA architecture to address the overall complexity. We have broken our system into different services according to complexity and functionality. When we serve a customer, multiple services come into picture. To identify the exact time taken by a service or failure in a service, we had two options:
a) Go through the logs and identify the exact issue or time taken by the component (too complex and takes a considerable amount of time).
b) Install an application monitoring system that can measure the performance of different services from the customer themselves and, in the case of issues, identify the issue and/or alert (less time required to diagnose the actual issue with visual representation).
The second option is much better in all scenarios.
The installation for New Relic is butter smooth and hardly took 5 minutes for the first server. It even reduced to less than 2 minutes for additional servers.
We found the following benefits after installing New Relic:
a) Ability to pin-point the exact module/service creating issues.
b) Lightening fast issue identification since there is no need to go through gigabytes of log files and, since we have a number of servers in our cluster, it isn't even feasible to check each and every server.
c) Access to web page load-time, size, and error tracking, vital for a e-commerce.
It would have been great had it provided thread-dump analysis and a few additional JVM-related stats. For reference, we can check JVisualVM.
We have used this solution for over 3+ Year. We put this system in 2012 and it is still up and running perfectly fine.
There were no issues encountered at all.
We didn't encounter issues with stability.
There were no issues with scalability.
Customer Service:
They were pretty helpful and quick in addressing our concerns.
Technical Support:
10 on a scale of 10.
We did not use any other solution.
It was very simple and took minimal effort and time.
New Relic only comes in SaaS flavor and installation is pretty quick. We used our in-house team for implementation.
From the perspective of effort and time taken while identifying issues and resolution, we have gained a lot. Not sure about the financial ROI.
It totally depends on the organization's requirements and the effort vs. return one puts in monitoring the system. Although, it would have been great if the licensing cost could be reduced a bit.
Yes. We evaluated AppDynamics.
Go ahead if you can afford it. You won't regret the decision.
Cool review