New Relic

New Relic is a cloud-based application performance monitoring (APM) solution designed for businesses to help them improve the quality of their code as well as discover or detect user-facing issues.

New Relic has long been one of the biggest players in the application performance monitoring or APM industry. The platform is highly regarded in the industry for its APM capabilities, delivering valuable insights to companies regarding their software performance. The company behind New Relic has recently relaunched its observability platform, now referred to as New Relic One, with a new more simplified pricing model, user interface, portfolio as well as a free tier that’s geared towards engineers who want to try the software, its IT environments and applications.

New Relic is in essence a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides a complete feature set, a full suite of products tailored to facilitate the monitoring process of IT systems and infrastructures, from the application side to the servers. The New Relic APM is the company’s flagship product, which is capable of delivering loads of meaningful performance metrics from your software applications. The tool also helps you detect trends in your applications’ response times and error rates. New Relic One, however, is now equipped with infrastructure monitoring tools to complete the suite.

This APM suite offers a wide range of capabilities that enable you to quickly identify user-facing issues with your application, enhance the overall quality of your code, collect actionable performance insights and improve the browser-side performance of your applications. New Relic is much more than an observability platform. It provides companies with other useful products and solutions, such as real-time analytics, application development, mobile application management, production monitoring, infrastructure monitoring and cloud migration.

New Relic’s dashboards also provide users with more advanced analytics capabilities, as more and more businesses and organizations depend on its comprehensive suite to help resolve many of their application, infrastructure and other technological challenges. New Relic One delivers SaaS web and mobile app monitoring for Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, Node.js, .Net, Android and iOS applications. With all of its features and capabilities, New Relic plays a significant role as the only platform companies will need to help them monitor the end-to-end availability, health and performance of their applications.

New Relic Features

Application performance monitoring (APM)

As previously mentioned, APM is New Relic’s flagship product. It is arguably the strongest offering of the SaaS observability platform, supporting multiple programming languages, as mentioned above. To begin the process of monitoring an application, the user has to first install an agent. If you were to monitor a Django app, for example, you can install the Python agent to facilitate the process. The agent is capable of picking up several transactions and operations, and then measures their response times.

Once the user installs and runs the agent, it can begin collecting and analyzing performance data from the application, almost immediately. It will then deliver a detailed report via the newly designed app interface. Users can easily view the comprehensive analysis of their application’s Apdex scores, latency, throughput and other relevant performance metrics using New Relic’s overview dashboard within just a few minutes.

Application development

New Relic is designed to help bring IT and DevOps closer together. Tear down the walls that divide them, so to speak. The SaaS observability platform achieves this by allowing end-to-end visibility through its application development solution. IT and DevOps teams can easily detect bugs and other performance issues by simply monitoring real-time deployment markers, which indicate the before and after performance metrics. The platform features clean and easy-to-navigate dashboards, which help teams analyze the full history of their app deployments.

Synthetic monitoring

New Relic Synthetics is one of the core solutions available with the New Relic One observability platform. Setting up the synthetic monitoring process is pretty simple and straightforward. The feature can be beneficial for collecting synthetic monitoring data within a single location. It is capable of supporting up to four types of monitoring processes, which include simple browser monitoring, scripted browser monitoring, ping monitoring and API testing.

Mobile application management

New Relic’s mobile application management solution is one of the more relevant products in the market and is specifically designed to facilitate the unique requirements of mobile app developers. The tool allows them to analyze and enhance the app performance times. The main goal with using this type of software is to minimize the time spent on troubleshooting issues and spend most of it on building features and improving performance instead.

New Relic Mobile, which is the mobile app management product of New Relic, provides mobile app developers the tools they need to focus on app development and deployment. The solution is equipped with a single dashboard that provides all the meaningful insights that allow them to determine the status, health and performance of their apps after each deployment. Using New Relic Mobile, developers should be able to easily identify performance issues and errors in recently launched code, giving them the ability to take the appropriate action before it reaches the end-users.

Alerting and Apdex scores

New Relic is equipped with a great alerting feature that notifies you in real-time when an issue with your key transactions is detected by the system. The alert feature can be easily configured by simply using the sliding bars that represent the warning and critical thresholds. The thresholds are based on Apdex scores, which means that you or your team must be experienced or familiar with this kind of system before implementing the feature.

The Apdex score system carries with it quite a steep learning curve, which is why results that are based on the Apdex score can be misleading to new and inexperienced users. This is what New Relic’s results are based on. Apdex scores measure user satisfaction in relation to the application’s response times. In essence, it measures the ratio of unsatisfactory to satisfactory response times. The system achieves this by utilizing a tolerable value, i.e. T-value that is determined by the end-user.

New Relic Benefits

New Relic offers a wide variety of benefits for businesses, IT and DevOps teams. Some of the main benefits that you can expect when implementing the SaaS observability platform, and implementing it effectively, are its quick and easy performance data collection, its data storage and analysis capabilities, its mobile app monitoring solutions and its extensive suite of features and tools designed for software monitoring, development and creation.

New Relic One is fully capable of gathering, storing and analyzing app performance data and turning them into meaningful insights that IT and DevOps teams can leverage to create better, more powerful applications for use of the company or their clients. Another key advantage that New Relic offers its users is the way it empowers them to focus more on writing codes instead of spending most of their time troubleshooting.

The cloud-based APM solution is not just for IT and DevOps teams looking to gain more visibility with their applications. Top management may also leverage the platform to come up with smart, data-driven decisions for their business applications. Moreover, the mobile app monitoring and management solution can help mobile app developers and teams to design and create more stable, high-performance mobile applications that deliver a great end-user experience.

The SaaS app performance monitoring platform also helps with the browser-side performance, not just software applications, empowering IT and software developers with comprehensive and meaningful insights.

New Relic One provides multi-platform support, which is another great advantage for software developers and IT teams. Instead of creating software apps that are based on expensive existing application architectures, many companies today are more inclined on developing apps that get the job done right as quickly and easily as possible, providing immediate value to the organization and the DevOps team. This has resulted in apps being written in programming languages and frameworks that are capable of getting the job done fast.

This is where New Relic’s multi-platform support can prove its value. This APM solution is capable of monitoring applications written in different languages and frameworks, such as PHP, .NET, Python, Ruby, Node.js and Java. Whatever programming language your software application is written in, New Relic One is equipped with the right tools and capabilities to monitor and fully analyze its status, health and performance.

New Relic Pricing

New Relic offers simple and transparent pricing plans. While it follows a subscription-based model, you only have to pay for the products that you actually use. A free package is available, which is good for one free full user and unlimited free basic users. This package is free forever. The Standard plan also offers one free full user with unlimited free basic users. However, the customer will have the option to add up to five full users, priced at $99/month per extra full user.

The Pro and Enterprise packages are quote-based, so you will need to contact the vendor’s sales team to discuss pricing. You can create your Free and Standard account at no cost, no credit card required. You may visit the vendor’s official website for more information.

Conclusion

New Relic is a robust, full-featured application performance and synthetic monitoring platform that carries quite a bit of a learning curve, just like any other complex or sophisticated software solutions in the market. It has some aspects, however, that are quite user-friendly and easy to understand. So, if you’re looking for an APM solution that has multi-platform support and can monitor apps across multiple servers, New Relic is not a bad choice.