Within the first minute after deploying the light-weight agent on your web server,
New Relic will automatically begin sending data about the app's activity to New
Relic's secure data center. Their analytics and reporting engines will process
the data and make it available to you immediately. After logging into the New
Relic web app, the service will immediately 'light up' with data about your application.
From here you can customize your views, drill into slow transactions, and see
inside your app. The engine captures a large amount of information in real time
- information that is not provided by other application monitoring and statistics
tools.
We installed New Relic for a test run on a Windows Server 2008 machine we run. Installation
was a no-brainer, and within minutes we were able to see valuable information.
New Relic currently monitors 242,929 Apps, captures 31 billion daily metrics,
and has over 14,000 active customer accounts. The all-in-one web application
performance tool lets you see performance from the end user experience, through
servers, and right down to the line of application code. New Relic customers
include names like Groupon, Mashable, Sears, Intuit and others.
New Relic offers support via email and online resources. Pricing is extremely competitive,
ranging from the $24 monthly Standard deployment (for small projects) to the
Pro at $149/month (the one we tested) and custom options for more complex environments.
You get 24x7 App monitoring, 24x7 real user monitoring, performance troubleshooting,
database performance, data retention and more.
The web-based account dashboard is well organized and allows you to view reporting
on multiple categories of performance metrics in the following groups:
End User:
Average Response Time
Apdex scores
Web pages
Browsers
Maps
App Server:
Overview
Map
Web Transactions
Database
External Services
Background Tasks
Diagnostics:
Transaction traces
Browser traces
Slow SQL
Errors
Alerts
Reports:
SLA
Avaiability
Deployments
Scalability
Web Transactions
Database
Background jobs
The tool also offers a Settings area where you can easily configure desired settings
and preferences. We found some of these reports and graphs to be extremely valuable
as they enable you to pinpoint slow pages and transactions, graph and view them
over time (including comparing with a previous time period), Page load time by
country and state. You can view your server's average response time broken down
by tier (NET CLR, Request Queuing and Database), and errors. You can even drill
down into specific errors and view the stack trace, and you can view the end
user's response times as well.
In a nutshell, we found New Relic to be the only dashboard that lets you keep an
eye on application health and availability, real user experiences, server utilization,
code-level diagnostics, and more.
New Relic allows us to tune page performance based on proven metric, tune and improve
database transactions, and improve the availability and user-satisfaction of
our sites. You can find out more about New Relic at their site and download a free, fully functional 14 day trial.