What is our primary use case?
I used it in another organization. I had a project where we were using New Relic for monitoring APIs and utilization of nodes or hosts. It was a standard implementation that involved getting the statistics and configuring New Relic agents on the application servers. The data was sniffed from the network based on the configuration and then it was saved. We were using the out-of-the-box capability of New Relic. We didn't do any customization on New Relic.
How has it helped my organization?
It was a good solution. My boss, who was a VP, was very happy with the system, and he didn't want to change the system because it was working well. Whenever anything went wrong, we got clear information about that on the fly. This information helped the operations team in sorting things faster. It gave clear information and a complete picture of what was happening in our system, which helped the operations team in performing the required actions.
What is most valuable?
The alert mechanism is quite accurate when something goes wrong in your system. For example, if you have hundreds of APIs on your server, and any of the APIs is not performing well, you get an alert. When there is a drop or change in the threshold value, the beauty of New Relic is that within a fraction of seconds, all the stakeholders who are configured in the New Relic system will get an alert. That's one good thing.
There is a dashboard where you can view API-wise performance. When you click specific APIs, you can get detailed statistics for the same.
What needs improvement?
One thing that we noticed was that historical information was only for a limited period, which was not helpful in certain scenarios. For example, if I want to size my system for an event for New Year or Christmas season based on the historical data, I won't be able to find the historical data. Currently, the data is limited to three months. It would be helpful if they can provide historical data for a longer duration so that we can plan our system accordingly.
For how long have I used the solution?
It was used for more than four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Its stability is quite good. We don't see any issues with the stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We never had any challenges because our servers were scaled based on the load. When our load increased, we used to keep adding our servers to New Relic. We didn't see any challenges. It just required the agent configuration on the server. The only thing is that you have to put in more money when you are adding servers.
How was the initial setup?
It was straightforward. We didn't see any complexity because the setup of New Relic on the client side or the application side is more of the agent configuration.
Once your agents are configured in the pre-prod or production environment, the feed used to be taken automatically. The only thing is you have to open the proxy to the New Relic system. If that is done, the rest is taken care of automatically. I don't see any challenge.
What about the implementation team?
For the setup, we had one person from the customer IT who coordinated with the network team and got the proxy opened, and then tested connectivity between the on-premise site and New Relic data center.
Later on, we had one person for configuration because sometimes, we also did data masking when we wanted to mask certain data. We didn't want that feed to go to the New Relic data center. We didn't want that data to be exposed. To query the system, there were queries available in the New Relic documentation, and we used to follow that. We also had a customized dashboard. We could prepare our own dashboard for our critical use cases such as payments.
What was our ROI?
I would rate it a four out of five in terms of ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
If I remember it correctly, the pricing was based on the core, and the monthly subscription used to cost us $1,500 or $2,000.
We had pre-prod and production services. Costing was different for pre-prod and production. For pre-prod, it was 40% less than the production service cost. It was a combined package.
With our licensing, we could only query three months of data from the New Relic system. When we wanted to have the historical information, they said that it is going to be an additional licensing at an additional cost.
What other advice do I have?
You have to see the costs. If you want to scale to a larger system or you want to implement New Relic for the entire enterprise, the cost is going to be high because you have to run hundreds of servers. If you take the frontend applications, mobile applications, and required servers, there will be a huge load and traffic. Dynatrace is one of the alternatives. Our last customer wanted to scale, and they found Dynatrace to be better than New Relic in terms of features and price.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. It is one of the best products. The customer used it for more than four years before moving to Dynatrace. We were happy with it. The alert mechanism and other features were quite good.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner