New Relic Reviews

Our use cases were varied. We had front-facing applications, message brokers, API gateways, legacy applications running on RPC, and platforms. We used New Relic for instrumentation, and we discovered different metrics using it.

New Relic is an APM tool, similar to Dynatrace or Datadog. It uses an agent to discover metrics based on browser, mobile, and custom matrices. We can also develop synthetic monitoring. It has helped us in exploring the metrics.

The best feature of New Relic is its simple look and feel, making it easier to use than other tools.

One thing New Relic needs to improve is the user data schema. It wanted us to move from version one to version two, but that was difficult because we wanted to do single sign-on, and it couldn't support our Ping Identity platform. That's something New Relic needs to work on.

Another issue I have with New Relic is its suite licenses. It has a two-tier system: the full-stack observability, which requires a suite license, and the free version, which doesn't offer any peer review capabilities. It needs to change because having a suite license for a user who can only view the post-stack, not even the curated view, is a big no-no. Dynatrace or SAP don't have this issue.

I should point out one more thing about New Relic. We use it with OpenShift, and one of the issues we faced was that New Relic required root access, which was a concern because no admin in the world would give any third-party vendor root access. However, they seem to have corrected this in the next version. 

I have been using New Relic for three years. We're using version 8.0.

It has its limitations, but it is a stable solution. 

It is a cloud-based solution, so the platforms automatically scale. 

We struggled with the support. 

We are currently using Dynatrace. We have moved away from New Relic because of its shortcomings – the user data schema. They had two versions, and we couldn't group different entities under version one. For example, our enterprise applications are numerous, including activation, OSS, BSS applications, and so forth.

It is an expensive solution. The licensing scheme is based on users having to have full stack observability, and there is no free version for non-seat license users to access what they want to see. I believe it's an expensive tool. They were not like that a couple of years back. Their new licensing scheme is based on full-stack capabilities; many clients would not like it. I would rate the licensing model a four out of ten. It is a very poor licensing scheme. 

It works well, and it has a very good look and feel to it. However, it also has its limitations. So some clients may like it. That's why they will be willing to pay more for New Relic compared to any other API. It's fine.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Basically, I'm helping a customer of mine to set up monitoring items. What I'm doing is comparing solutions in order to create a document that I can give them so that they can pick one final solution.

The client is looking for infrastructure and for an application. 

So far, we like the insights.

Working with the solution is very easy. It's user-friendly. 

Overall, it's a good product, from what we have evaluated.

Currently, we're more in the process of gathering materials. The solution is quite new for us.

I haven't yet had too much of a chance to read up on the product or to compare it to other solutions to see if there are items that are standard elsewhere but lacking in this product. I need more time with the solution to really talk about any shortcomings if they exist at all. 

It would be nice if there were pre-made dashboards. There should be out-of-the-box options that you can have. It would be nice to have something already done, so that you don't need to reinvent the wheel again, to create your own dashboard. 

The pricing might be high if you are a company that goes through a lot of data.

I've been using the solution for about two years or so.

We're working on figuring out the pricing.

It looks like it's a little bit about how much data you ingest. Therefore, if you have a big environment, then it might not be good to ingest that month, as that much data will cost you a lot. 

On the other hand, Dynatrace has a good set of features where you can trace down to the application. However, they are more expensive they don't have some dashboards and cost is an issue for the client.  

I'm also looking at Dynatrace and Datadog.

The thing is all of these three solutions are doing the same thing. It depends. What we're currently comparing is pricing and if they work for the company on a budget level. We want to see what offers the most for the best rate. We're still trying to figure that out.

I'm just a consultant. I'm not a partner or a user of the solution.

I'm not sure if I have any specific advice to a company considering this solution as we are still in the early days of considering of this solution is the right fit. However, it's important to go through the process and examine a solution according to your company's unique needs. What works for our client might not work for everyone and vice versa. There needs to be a bit of research.

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a good product. It just depends on what you need as a company.

We were using New Relic Synthetics to test our application, which retrieved data from the web on a daily basis. Our second use case was that it helped us to isolate any bad code.

You put the hooks in for the website as a database, and you can drill down into all of the offending code. You can even go down into the SQL. We were running an Oracle database and I was the DBA, so the SQL level was my responsibility.

The most valuable feature was drill-downs. I was able to use it to drill-down into the SQL, get the response time, as well as the allocation based on IO, CPU, and the other resources attached to the SQL queries.

We were able to integrate with the messaging tool, Slack, which meant that we got notifications whenever something was not quite right.

There are certain features that are not supported in New Relic, such as CATSEARCH, which allows you to do a full-text search. Certain things like this would have helped me a little bit.

We used New Relic Synthetics for at least a year, up until the end of 2019.

It's a stable solution and we never had a problem with it.

Prior to New Relic, we were using some Oracle tools such as AWR. Although they were useful, they were not really proactive. New Relic is a more proactive tool, as it were.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but it was done in-house by one person. It took at least half a week to complete it. This included setting up the service, and Slack integration. It took a nice amount of time, in total.

I loved this product, but we can no longer afford it, so we dropped it.

Honestly, at first, I was very hesitant about using this product. My advice is to learn to use it and learn all of the features because it has many of them, not all of which are documented, but they work wonders. For us, they really helped a lot.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for server monitoring and strictly for our EC2 instances.

It has helped us maintain a much higher uptime than we had previously.

It fulfills the need that we had for the product.

Server uptime is its most valuable feature.

We have had issues with our agents going offline.

The stability has been fine.

Our environment has 25 servers.

The help from the technical support has always been good.

We have to install an agent on each of our instances.

New Relic was the main product that we looked at.

If you are looking for this specific type of application to keep a record of your inventory, then it does exactly what it is supposed to do.

We use their cloud version of it.

The primary use is for data application monitor, we used to add some backlogs into the application to see where the progress or the border makes in the process. So far, it is a good program.

I think it is the possibility to see the application flow, and gives us suggestions how to manage it. We have a mode we call "influx" where we can see statistics, traffic jams or other important information.

I think the APM mode can be improved. 

In addition, its difficult to have a predictive tool to see how the application would behave in the future when it basically only shows the historical data.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very sclable.

We looked at Dynatrace. We analyzed the differences between New Relic and Dynatrace and we realized that New Relic was easier to implement and that our Miami office had experience to do so. They had already started using it there, in the Operations office. So, we went with New Relic.

In my opinion, New Relic is a good tool, and if a colleague was asking my opinion, I would say "Go ahead and use it!" It is a good solution.

I’ve gotten our teams to use New Relic to help them craft code that properly performs right out of the gate. It complements our user-acceptance testing where we can put in performance testing right away.

We also have better transparency, we can see bottleneck in resources (need more memory, CPU, etc.), we can catch problems such as full disks before they crash our server. We never had that type of insight before. It makes our Ops teams’ lives easy because they just get emails as to potential issues.

It gives us the ability to determine when and what we need to scale, instead of just chucking machines at layers and hoping it’s right. It all goes towards giving our customers the best experience possible.

When you look at disk monitoring, it would be cool to see which folders are gobbling most space, so that when we get a full-disk alert, we can go into our servers to purge that without downloading a separate tool to see what’s contending for hard disk space.

Also, it's really well put together, but it would be nice to have more granularity for metrics displayed so that ops team can see more holistically what’s happening.

There are no stability problems. There have been slow points where data loads slowly, but it can be solved just by clicking refresh. No problems with agents crashing or not reporting data. So no reason for me to worry about its stability.

I never have to worry about not collecting data, but probably the web portion might need a little bit of work.

It’s scaled to all our needs. We have apps for on-site and in-cloud, and it’s worked well for both. There’s no problem with scalability.

We haven’t had to reach out yet, and hopefully things keep going smoothly.

I was involved for another account, but it was very straightforward, couldn’t possibly be simpler. So easy.

We looked at the ease of installation, how easy it is to get it put and running to see what’s happening on your machine.

• Real-time transaction monitoring.
• Seeing a failure from somewhere in the system that you do not have deep-level access to.
• Instantly being able to drill down. For various reasons, developers rarely have access to the production environment. So instead of three days of back and forth with approvals to gain access to the system, we have instantaneous insight into these systems.
• If there was a silver bullet, it tells us in real, actual time where time was spent. We can run it in production on all of our nodes without a performance hit. It doesn’t impact the end user.

Short turn-time to resolution is essential. It’s the flashlight to the core of an issue in a production environment that everyone may have missed in development, QA, and implementation.

So basically it allows the business to more efficiently spend its money rather than in QA. The faster you can identify these question marks and find answers, the faster we can solve the problem, and the quicker we can solve the problem. We can focus on net new value.

The new Insight stuff is pretty exciting, so that’s interesting to some of our clients. Some way to disable data scrubbing manually would be a big feature.

We’ve been in production for five years.

Never had an issue.

Again, no problems, but I've never run it at a site that is truly a top-100 site. We know there is some overhead, but nothing Google-scale.

The cost of the solution is high on a per-node licensing scheme and that’s the prohibitive factor, but in terms of the actual scalability there are no issues.

The licensing fee for a single node can be comparable in price to running that node, certainly in the modern cloud world.

We haven’t had an opportunity/need to use it.

The solution we were using before was cobbled together from a mixture of sources, various monitoring solutions. None of them really offered the visibility of the overall health of the application. They’re all sort of looking at unrelated data points and we were left to infer what was happening.

New Relic understands the common tools you’re using; they had the first player advantage, plus the kind of nailed everything else. When they first released APM for Ruby there was nothing else like it, and there was barely anything else like it for any other tech stack. When they first hit market they were fundamentally different and better.

New Relic “hides” all of the stuff that is less valuable and lets the good stuff bubble up which lets you focus on that rather than anything else. A huge part of it has been the lack of having to do any app configuration to get started.

Incredibly straightforward. Procurement is the hard part.

Dynatrace came up in conversations, but not really. Solarwinds also.

New Relic is the first thing we bring up. When the vendor is aligned with the rest of the development community around the technologies. They have nice trial periods, month-to-month, which does make it easy. We are looking for solutions that allow us to say with a straight face to our clients that they work and they’re safe.

They didn’t rake us over the coals to start extracting value, and there's no lock-in. We got really fast results times and it's a pleasure to work with. A growing suite of tools that work together, New Relic is going after bringing solutions to a contiguous set of needs. It’s a win for the clients, and it’s a safe bet for the future.

Understand whether you’re using a SaaS; the organization needs to be warm to the solution. Put together a PoC to show the value of the product – put it in a dev environment and start feeding it data to be able to understand the value of it.

• Ease of installation
• Ease of use
• It provides a common platform for Dev and Ops to be able to pinpoint and communicate problems
• The solution allows us to quickly pinpoint problems
• There’s good integration between all the products in the suite – browser and some of the plugins

Being able to quickly figure out the root causes of issues. It also makes it very easy to share that information with developers and other people within engineering – we can drill down in parallel.

There are a number of plugins that New Relic makes. It would be nice to be able to instantly integrate that with APM. Right now, they’re in their own little area, so it’s not as easy to quickly dive into a problem, for example in PHP. It’s a little hard to get data on the back end.

The stability and uptime have been great. They do a great job in notifying of maintenance windows. We have had some graph inconsistencies which might represent a quirk in the solution, but we haven’t seen that in a while.

It’s a very scalable solution. We have it on maybe a couple of hundred hosts today. We use an automation tool, Puppet, so we’re able to quickly install the New Relic agent across classes of servers easily. On their end as well, they’re collecting more data, so it seems like they’re scaling out very well too. There are no performance issues with scale.

Actually we haven’t had to use it yet.

Prior to New Relic, we did not have an APM solution. We had a lot of home-built tools but nothing like this with dashboards. Mainly the maintenance of the home-built tools was difficult. It was tribal knowledge with no documentation, so we were constrained by the engineers and their specific knowledge of the tools.

Very straightforward – it was great that everything was packaged so we didn’t have to do too much customization. We changed maybe two lines in the config. The documentation was very straightforward. Once we installed it a couple of times manually, we were able to script it, which was very easy as well.

There weren’t really any contenders – it was go with our home grown solution or this. Initially the product effectiveness was the top of the list. Cost is a consideration. Really cost was secondary to whether the tool actually worked and delivered value. Support wasn’t high on the list but it was a consideration. Mainly the ease of use and product effectiveness are the two main considerations.

It’s a solid product. They continue to innovate year after year. They’re getting closer to a 10, but because of the speed of innovation I think there are a few disconnects within the suite/product line. That’s the main thing that keep sit from being a perfect solution, but they’re a very solid product and a very solid company.

It needs to be a cross-organizational evaluation. Can’t be Dev or Ops-only. The solution definitely needs to be low friction to get it into the environment. Being open to the customers in terms of what their product roadmap is and what the customer can expect, and then getting feedback from the customer to help them along as well is important.

Reviews are important. A lot of times other companies are trying to solve similar problems. People are going to be trying competitive solutions, so getting feedback is important to the vetting process.