New Relic: the Observability Platform

New Relic  is primarily used for log monitoring, where queries on the logs provide insights and create log-based metrics for all alerting-related requirements. The focus is mainly on alerting and dashboards.

New Relic  helped with the mean time to detection, the MTDD metric tracked for applications. For the platform, the detection capability enabled a reduction from around 20 to 30 minutes down to three minutes. This has been really helpful in terms of detecting issues as well as helping to triage and troubleshoot issues faster, creating a positive impact on the organization.

One of the best features that New Relic offers is the user interface, which is much easier to use compared to other products such as Datadog  or Splunk. The team management and alert configuration process is also fairly straightforward. New Relic is very useful for teams that don't have much of a dedicated DevOps team but want to have observability for their platform, and it's an easy way to get started.

One of the main UI features is the ability to see a particular frequency, such as an error or a high amount of logs at a particular timestamp, and easily filter that via the graph as well as the timestamps that can be configured. This is relatively easy to use compared to other products.

New Relic is priced on the higher side. Because of the pricing model, organizations have experienced uncontrolled costs and were not able to afford New Relic, which resulted in moving to open-source solutions such as Grafana  and Loki. This pricing structure has been the main pain point experienced with New Relic.

New Relic has been used for the past two years.

One of the metrics that helped as a return on investment was the ability to detect issues faster and troubleshoot more quickly, which in turn helped to achieve a much better service level agreement with customers.

Pricing is primarily an area of concern. The overall rating for New Relic is eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )

What do you like best about the product?

I like that New Relic provides end-to-end visibility across applications, infrastructure, logs, and user experience in a single platform. It makes troubleshooting faster and helps us understand performance issues holistically instead of in isolation.

What do you dislike about the product?

The platform is extremely powerful, but the learning curve can be steep. Some of the advanced features and configurations aren’t very intuitive initially and require time

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

New Relic enables us to pinpoint performance issues across our services much more quickly. By bringing together application metrics, logs, and alerts in a single platform, it significantly cuts down the time we spend troubleshooting and enhances the reliability of our systems. As a result, our customers benefit directly, and handling on-call responsibilities has become far more manageable.

What do you like best about the product?

As a user, what I value most is having a comprehensive, unified view of our entire technology stack on a single platform. The NRQL query language stands out as exceptional, enabling us to pose detailed questions about all our application, log, and infrastructure data in one place. This capability has significantly reduced the time it takes to troubleshoot issues.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main challenge I face is the steep learning curve caused by the overwhelming number of features. For new team members, the interface often appears cluttered and can be difficult to navigate, which makes it hard to quickly locate the specific metrics or logs needed for troubleshooting. This complexity tends to slow down the onboarding process.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

New Relic addresses the challenge of having monitoring data scattered and isolated across our complex, modern software architecture. Previously, we needed to consult several different tools for logs, metrics, and traces just to diagnose a single issue.

The main advantage is a significant decrease in Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). By bringing all our data together in one platform and automatically correlating it with features such as Distributed Tracing, we are able to quickly identify the root cause from the initial user click all the way to the database query and resolve production problems up to five times faster than before.

What do you like best about the product?

I use New Relic for monitoring application performance, tracking errors, and ensuring that the system runs smoothly, which really enhances my workflow efficiency. The ability to identify issues quickly is invaluable, especially in recognizing API slowness and debugging production issues faster. The alert system is incredibly helpful as it allows me to stay proactive by identifying issues in real time before they impact users, saving us from potential downtime. I love the detailed transaction traces feature, which provides in-depth insights into API slowness or unusual traffic, enabling me to respond swiftly and appropriately. The initial setup of New Relic was easy, with clear installation steps, although configuring alerts and dashboards required a bit more time. Overall, these features significantly contribute to maintaining performance reliability and optimizing system operations.

What do you dislike about the product?

The dashboard load time could be reduced, especially when it contains multiple queries and during peak hours.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use New Relic to monitor application performance, quickly identify issues, track errors, and ensure smooth system operations, utilizing real-time alerts and detailed transaction traces to address API slowness and debug production faster.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about New Relic is how quickly it helps me understand what’s going wrong in our application. The dashboards are clean, and I can get to the important metrics—like response time, error rates, and slow transactions—without digging around too much. The real-time insights are extremely helpful, especially when we’re troubleshooting production issues. It saves a lot of time and gives a clear picture of system health almost instantly.

What do you dislike about the product?

One thing I dislike about New Relic is that some of the advanced features feel a bit overwhelming at first. The platform is powerful, but certain sections are not very intuitive, and it takes time to figure out where everything is. The UI can feel cluttered when you're trying to drill down into detailed traces or custom dashboards. Also, some features require extra configuration, which isn’t always obvious from the start.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

New Relic helps us identify performance issues quickly and understand exactly where bottlenecks are happening in our application. It gives clear visibility into slow APIs, database queries, error spikes, and overall system health. Because of this, we catch issues much earlier and fix them faster, which directly reduces downtime and improves user experience.It also centralizes our logs, metrics, and traces in one place, so debugging becomes much easier. Overall, it saves time during incident investigations and helps the team stay more proactive instead of reacting after users report problems.