Is Your New Relic Data a Waste? Avoid These Mistakes

For many companies, New Relic is a critical piece of technology infrastructure. But simply implementing it isn’t enough. Are you truly getting the most out of your investment, or are you unknowingly making mistakes that are costing you time, money, and valuable insights?

Sarah, a lead developer at a mid-sized e-commerce company in Alpharetta, GA, was pulling her hair out. Website performance had been sluggish for weeks, especially during peak shopping hours around lunchtime and after 5 PM, causing customer complaints to flood in. The operations team was equally frustrated, blaming everything from network congestion to database overload. They had New Relic installed, but no one seemed to know how to effectively use it to diagnose the problem.

The initial problem? They were drowning in data but starved for information. New Relic was spitting out metrics, but they were mostly relying on the default dashboards, which presented a broad, unfocused view of the entire system. Sarah’s team hadn’t taken the time to customize the dashboards to reflect their specific business goals and the unique architecture of their application. They were seeing CPU usage, memory consumption, and response times, but they couldn’t correlate these metrics to specific user experiences or critical business transactions.

I’ve seen this happen far too often. Companies invest in powerful monitoring tools like New Relic, but then fail to configure them properly, rendering them almost useless. It’s like buying a high-end telescope and never learning how to focus it.

Mistake 1: Neglecting Custom Dashboards and Alerts

The first, and perhaps most common, mistake is sticking with the default New Relic configuration. The out-of-the-box dashboards provide a general overview, but they lack the granularity needed to identify specific performance bottlenecks.

Instead, you should create custom dashboards tailored to your application’s architecture and your business’s key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, an e-commerce company might want to track metrics like average order value, conversion rate, and checkout completion time. A financial services firm might focus on transaction processing time, error rates, and API response latency.

Furthermore, setting up proactive alerts is crucial. Don’t wait for users to complain about slow performance; configure alerts to notify you when key metrics exceed predefined thresholds. New Relic’s alerting system allows you to define complex conditions based on multiple metrics and set up notifications via email, Slack, or other channels. For instance, you could set up an alert to trigger if the average response time for a critical API endpoint exceeds 500ms for more than five minutes.

Mistake 2: Ignoring Distributed Tracing

In today’s microservices-based architectures, a single user request can traverse multiple services. If one of those services is experiencing a performance issue, it can be difficult to pinpoint the root cause without distributed tracing.

New Relic’s distributed tracing feature allows you to track requests as they propagate through your system, providing a complete end-to-end view of the transaction. This helps you identify which services are contributing to latency and where the bottlenecks are occurring.

Back to Sarah’s situation: the team suspected the problem might be in their inventory service. It was a critical component, but they weren’t sure how to prove it. After enabling distributed tracing in New Relic, they quickly discovered that the inventory service was indeed the culprit. A poorly optimized database query was causing significant delays, especially when the service was under heavy load. This was happening in the busy commercial district around North Point Mall, where lunch orders spiked at the same time every day.

Without distributed tracing, they would have continued to chase their tails, wasting valuable time and resources trying to diagnose the problem.

Mistake 3: Overlooking Data Retention Policies

New Relic stores a vast amount of data, which can be incredibly valuable for historical analysis and trend identification. However, storing excessive data can also increase costs and complicate analysis.

It’s important to regularly review and prune your data retention policies to ensure that you’re only storing the data you need. New Relic allows you to configure different retention periods for different types of data, such as transaction traces, events, and logs.

Consider which data is most critical for your business and adjust the retention periods accordingly. For example, you might want to retain transaction traces for a shorter period than error logs, as error logs can be useful for debugging and identifying recurring issues.

We ran into this exact issue at my previous firm. The client, a large healthcare provider in Atlanta, was storing years’ worth of transaction data, even though they rarely used it for analysis. After reviewing their data retention policies, we were able to reduce their New Relic bill by 30% without sacrificing any critical insights.

Mistake 4: Failing to Monitor Key Business Transactions

While monitoring system-level metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption is important, it’s equally important to monitor key business transactions. These are the transactions that directly impact your revenue and customer experience.

For an e-commerce company, key business transactions might include adding an item to the cart, completing a purchase, or creating an account. For a financial services firm, they might include processing a payment, transferring funds, or opening a new account.

New Relic allows you to define custom transactions and track their performance. This provides valuable insights into how your application is performing from a business perspective. Are customers able to complete purchases quickly and easily? Are payments being processed without errors?

Sarah’s team wasn’t tracking the “Add to Cart” transaction specifically. Once they started monitoring it, they noticed a significant increase in latency during peak hours, right before the checkout process. Customers were abandoning their carts because it was taking too long to add items.

This is a critical insight that they would have missed if they were only focusing on system-level metrics.

Mistake 5: Neglecting Log Management

Logs are a valuable source of information for troubleshooting and debugging. New Relic’s log management feature allows you to collect, process, and analyze logs from your entire infrastructure in a single place.

However, many companies fail to take full advantage of this feature. They might collect logs, but they don’t properly index them or set up alerts based on log patterns.

Proper log management can help you identify and resolve issues more quickly. For example, you can set up alerts to notify you when specific error messages appear in your logs or when the frequency of error messages exceeds a certain threshold. According to Splunk, effective log management is crucial for security and compliance.

Here’s what nobody tells you: log management isn’t just about collecting logs; it’s about making them actionable.

After identifying the database query issue in the inventory service, Sarah’s team used New Relic’s log management to analyze the database logs. They discovered that the query was missing an index, which was causing it to perform a full table scan. Adding the index immediately resolved the performance issue and significantly improved the speed of the “Add to Cart” transaction. The fix was deployed at 2:00 PM, just in time for the afternoon rush. By 5:00 PM, customer complaints had virtually disappeared, and the operations team could finally breathe a sigh of relief.

Sarah’s experience highlights the importance of proactively addressing potential issues before they impact users. By avoiding these common New Relic mistakes, you can ensure that you’re getting the most out of your monitoring investment and delivering a better user experience.

If you are looking to improve application speed, monitoring is key.

Effective monitoring also requires understanding common tech performance myths, so you don’t waste time chasing the wrong problems.

You may also want to consider Datadog monitoring as another option.

Don’t let your New Relic investment go to waste. Take the time to properly configure and maintain your monitoring system, and you’ll be well on your way to delivering a faster, more reliable, and more profitable application. Start by identifying one area for improvement today. Maybe it’s customizing a dashboard, setting up a new alert, or reviewing your data retention policies. Every small step counts.