Name: New Relic
Brand: New Relic
Rating: 4.2 (172 reviews)

it_user11631

Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Oct 22, 2013

The awesomeness that is New Relic

Explained by example

The best way to explain how New Relic can help, is by example.

A few weeks back, one of the magento based webstes I manage had some serious delays at checkout. After 'submit payment' was clicked, some users reported that the site could take up to 40 seconds (and in some instances just timed out) to respond back with the resulting page. Yikes! This was just unaccepatble.

After spending nearly 5 hours tracking this down (without New Relic), and not getting a clear view of the reasons, and not being able to replicate the issue, I signed up to New Relic, and hooked the site up.

And within an hour I had the reasons, and a fixed was placed on the site.

New Relic 'Key Transactions'

New Relic has this great new feature called ' Key Transactions'. This feature gives you the ability to mark any transaction as important, and it will appear in a new menu called 'Transactions'. This feature makes it a lot easier to monitor the transactions you are specifically interested in. In my case, I marked the checkout process (/onestepcheckout/index/index) as a Key Transaction.

Ok, so now I can monitor the actual checkout process specifically, and I am ready to collect information on what the hell is going on.

I placed a test order. And yep, I could not replicate the issue, all looked good, and I got the result page within a few seconds.

But all was not lost. All I had to do was wait for New Relic to collect details about every checkout, and I coud analyze the results.

It did not take long to finally find the reason behind the intermitted delay.

The trace from New Relic for a transaction that took more than 20 seconds to complete:

as easy as that, I now had the reason for the delay: Email mailing list subscriptions at checkout!

The reason I could not replicate this issue was because my user was already subscribed to the mailing list, thus, at checkout I would never got the 'subcribe to mailing list' checkbox.

Now that I knew what was going on, I could easily relicate the issue, implement a fix, and eliminate the delay at checkout.

Easy as.

The conclusion

Without the help of New Relic, it would have been near impossible task to track this issue down. New Relic not only saved me hours of frustration, but saved me hours of time, and allowed me to quickly, effectively target, and fix the problem at hand.

Simply put: New Relic is a developers best friend.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user4968

Developer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Mar 11, 2013

I’ve used new relic with my rails apps for over a year now and like the service a lot

I’ve used new relic with my rails apps for over a year now and like the service a lot. I recently noticed that they have integration with php so I decided to get the php agent configured on my server so I could get stats on an upcoming symfony 2 app.

I use Nginx / PHP-fpm to run my php apps on ubuntu. The install instructions on the new relic site worked pretty well except for one minor quirk.

I had to install php5-dev so that the new relic install script had php-config to execute to find out information about my install. After that, the install script kept complaining that it could not find a valid php install on the system.

With this particular setup, new relic would look for php in /usr/bin/php (from the php-config script) but that did not exist. There was /usr/bin/php5-fpm and /usr/bin/php5-cgi.

I created a symlink for /usr/bin/php and reran the install script.

Success!

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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it_user1020

Head of Data Center at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Jan 3, 2013

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Great monitoring product. Potential privacy and security issues but the cons might just be too tempting not to try it..

Valuable Features:

New Relic has proven itself as a very reliable and convenient way to monitor your servers and applications. Compared to other cloud-based offerings, New Relic is easy to install and provides a lot of information to you in a very convenient and easy to understand dashboard.I chose to test drive New Relic after seeing the graphs from a fellow sysad. I was amazed at the level of information and detail that I saw that I decided to try it out myself. What's even more impressive is that you can share monitoring servers or apps with other members of New Relic. Notifications are also available via email, and all of the notifications for my servers and services arrive on time. This allows me to immediately check what is happening and take appropriate action if necessary.

Room for Improvement:

One major issue for me with New Relic is data privacy. Though installation is a breeze for most operating systems, the thought of installing a monitoring application and seeing a lot of information about my servers or applications somewhere is somewhat nerve-wracking. Right now, I do not know what other information is being sent to New Relic's servers and I don't have any control as to what is being monitored and sent. This can be a major issue for some companies, and care must be taken is there is no settings page presented during installation to enable or disable certain parameters for monitoring.Overall, New Relic is a great product is recommended for use. Just make sure that you understand the potential privacy and data theft issues associated with cloud-based services.

Other Advice:

Personally, I would like to have an options pages during installation detailing what can be monitored and allow me to only select certain parameters to be reported. Also, network usage of the tool should also be profiled as it might consume a significant amount of your bandwidth if you have many servers being monitored.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user660

Data Center Expert at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

May 22, 2012

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Unique model, ultra-modern product

Valuable Features:

From operationally rich, to developer deep. Invites dev and ops to work together, most operational APM tools don't invite the dev. Most easily adopted APM tool. For innovators first, then the rest of the Org will start to "Get It".

Room for Improvement:

It is a SaaS service and this creates internal friction that needs innovative solutions (but you have to own that).ROI is very high because a single SKU product is rare in APM today, and the ability to move licenses anywhere is an amazing agility quotient.

Other Advice:

ROI - found key issues in the first month in the biggest Alexa-rated site that we own.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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May 30, 2013

The importance of New Relic is that the user do not have to install and maintain the back end monitoring system, its database and its storage - that is all done by New Relic. The user just have to install the New Relic agents into his applications.