I have used both the paid version and free version of new relic. My experience with the paid version was limited though. I used it on the job for a couple of months. I also used the 14 day trail they give you with my own projects. Even though the paid version gives you more features if you are a small business or website you don’t really need the paid version. The free version actually gives you enough information to be very useful. After talking with new relic support one thing they told me they want the free version to be useful. So they try to pack as much as possible into the free version but still be able to make money on the paid version for larger applications or businesses. The setup process could not be any easier.

Basically to set it up you just have to follow their documentation. Which in my opinion really well done it’s step by step. For example if you add it to a PHPapplication you just need to follow these instructions. It should take less than 10 minutes to setup. After you have it setup everything starts working right away. You start getting real time data within a minute. Also if you have it already installed on your server the setup process for other domains or subdomains is even easier. It would take less than a couple of minutes. It basically involves editing your .htaccess file. That is for PHP of course I believe the setup with a rails environment is about the same except you are adding it to you Gemfile. I have also had the experience of setting it up with an Android application. Again the setup process is very easy. They have instructions for different environments like Eclipse. The total time for the setup again is less than 10 minutes. So you are not having to put a lot of time getting it up and running. Not only is the setup easy but you also get a lot of really good features for free.

The best feature in my opinion is getting to see the transactions timed. For example you can see the load times for each request. It even breaks it down by the script name. This will allow you to target specific actions in your controller to refactor. It will also keep an Apdex score. This can be useful to see how well your site is responding to requests. You can do your research on what the scale is. Another feature for your website monitoring is it will send you an email alert if your site or application is down. You get these alerts right away when it goes down and then when it’s back up. You will also get a report with the downtime and how long it was. There are other tools that will do this but I have not had as good of a experience with them. On the Android or mobile side you get to see interactions with your application. So when the user hits a specific activity you will see how long the application is taking to respond. This is very important as each device the response time will be different. Some phones have better processors and respond faster. It’s important to know that some users may not be having a good experience. That is something that Google doesn’t provide either. Other information it tracks is OS versions and devices. Less important statistics as Google also tracks those.  The last free feature that I find useful is server information. It will give you your memory usage, CPU usage, processes running and space left on your disc. The best part of all these features as they call come with the free edition! The only downside is that this information is only retained on their site for 24 hours. After that is is gone. But again for free you can utilize their API and can download all that information locally if you want. The possible for free are endless. Although I do not have experience with their API it looks like a standard restful API.

I think new relic is worth checking out at the very least. I believe that it’s the tool of the future for server and application monitoring. I suppose it’s been around long enough to be called the tool of the present to. I have had no issues since I started using their service. Their customer service has been great and responded fast to questions too. Also you get to start with a free 14 day trial they don’t even ask for your credit card at least at the time I signed up they didn’t. Plus you get a free t-shirt just for signing up. I think the free version is enough to keep a small company or website satisfied. If you are a larger company I think their full version would be enough so you also have that option. You get all the features with the 14 day trial so you can see for yourself.