New Relic Costing You? Avoid These Key Mistakes

Are You Making These Costly New Relic Mistakes?

New Relic is a powerful platform for monitoring your technology stack, but are you truly maximizing its potential? Many organizations invest in New Relic, only to find themselves frustrated by a lack of actionable insights and a bloated bill. Are you sure you’re not throwing money away with a New Relic setup that’s more confusing than helpful?

The Problem: Data Overload, Insight Underload

The promise of New Relic is clear: deep visibility into your applications and infrastructure. But many teams get lost in the sheer volume of data that New Relic provides. They’re drowning in metrics, yet starving for actionable insights. The result? Missed performance bottlenecks, delayed incident response, and a nagging feeling that they’re not getting their money’s worth.

I remember a client in Buckhead who was convinced their website was running smoothly. They had New Relic installed, dashboards displaying key metrics, and yet, customer complaints about slow loading times persisted. When we dug deeper, we found they were only monitoring a fraction of their services.

What Went Wrong First? Common Pitfalls

Before we get to the solutions, let’s examine some common mistakes that lead to this frustrating situation:

• Insufficient Instrumentation: This is perhaps the most prevalent issue. You install the New Relic agent, but you don’t configure it to monitor all the critical components of your application. Are you tracking database queries? Background jobs? External service calls? If not, you’re missing a huge part of the picture.
• Generic Alerting: Setting up alerts is crucial, but many teams simply create generic alerts based on default thresholds. This leads to alert fatigue – a constant barrage of notifications that are often irrelevant or unactionable. When everything is urgent, nothing is.
• Ignoring NRQL: The New Relic Query Language (NRQL) is incredibly powerful, allowing you to slice and dice your data in countless ways. However, many users stick to the pre-built dashboards and reports, missing out on the opportunity to create custom visualizations tailored to their specific needs.
• Lack of Tagging and Metadata: Without proper tagging, it becomes difficult to correlate data across different parts of your system. You need to be able to filter and group metrics by application, environment, region, and other relevant attributes.
• Neglecting Synthetics Monitoring: Relying solely on real user monitoring (RUM) can be misleading. Synthetics monitoring allows you to proactively test your application’s performance from different locations and under different conditions.

The Solution: A Proactive Approach to New Relic

The key to unlocking New Relic’s full potential lies in a proactive, strategic approach. Here’s a step-by-step guide to avoiding those common mistakes and getting real value from your investment:

Step 1: Comprehensive Instrumentation

Don’t settle for the default instrumentation. Take the time to identify all the critical components of your application and ensure they’re being properly monitored. This includes:

• Database queries: Track the performance of your SQL queries, identify slow queries, and optimize your database schema.
• External service calls: Monitor the latency and error rates of your calls to third-party APIs.
• Background jobs: Track the execution time and success rates of your background jobs.
• Custom transactions: Define custom transactions to track specific user flows and business processes.

For example, if you’re running an e-commerce site, you might want to track the “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” transactions. These are critical to your business, and any performance issues in these areas will directly impact your revenue.

Step 2: Intelligent Alerting

Ditch the generic alerts and create alerts that are tailored to your specific needs and context. This means:

• Defining clear thresholds: Don’t just set alerts based on arbitrary numbers. Analyze your historical data to identify the normal range of values for each metric and set thresholds accordingly.
• Using anomaly detection: New Relic offers anomaly detection features that can automatically identify unusual patterns in your data and trigger alerts.
• Integrating with your incident management system: Ensure that alerts are automatically routed to the appropriate teams and that incidents are tracked and resolved efficiently.

Consider a scenario where your average response time spikes during peak hours. Instead of a static threshold, use New Relic’s anomaly detection to trigger an alert when the response time deviates significantly from the expected behavior during that time period.

Step 3: Mastering NRQL

NRQL is your secret weapon for unlocking the true power of New Relic. Invest the time to learn the basics of NRQL and start creating custom dashboards and reports that are tailored to your specific needs. You can use NRQL to:

• Create custom metrics: Calculate derived metrics based on your existing data.
• Visualize data in new ways: Create custom charts and graphs that provide unique insights into your application’s performance.
• Identify trends and patterns: Use NRQL to analyze your data over time and identify trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.

For instance, you could use NRQL to calculate the average order value for customers who experience a slow loading time on the checkout page. This would help you quantify the impact of performance issues on your revenue.

Step 4: Strategic Tagging

Implement a consistent tagging strategy to make it easier to filter and group your data. Tag your applications, environments, regions, and other relevant attributes. This will allow you to quickly identify the root cause of performance issues and track the impact of changes across your system.

Imagine you’re deploying a new version of your application. With proper tagging, you can easily compare the performance of the new version to the old version and identify any regressions.

Step 5: Embrace Synthetics

Don’t rely solely on RUM. Use synthetics monitoring to proactively test your application’s performance from different locations and under different conditions. This will help you identify issues before they impact your users.

Set up synthetic monitors to check the availability and performance of your key pages and APIs. Run these monitors from different geographic locations to ensure that your application is performing well for all your users. We use monitors running from data centers near 285 and GA400 to simulate local user experience. We’ve found that mobile and web app speed is crucial to user retention.

A Case Study: From Chaos to Clarity

Last year, we worked with a SaaS company in the Perimeter Center area of Atlanta that was struggling with frequent outages. They had New Relic installed, but they weren’t using it effectively. After a week of analysis, we found their primary issue was improperly configured database monitoring. They were only sampling a small percentage of their queries. We reconfigured their New Relic agent to capture 100% of queries and set up alerts for slow query execution times. We also created custom dashboards to visualize database performance metrics. Within a month, they saw a 40% reduction in database-related incidents and a 15% improvement in overall application performance. They were able to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks much faster, leading to a significant improvement in customer satisfaction. The CEO told me, “We were paying for New Relic but not using it. Now it’s actually saving us money.”

Failed Approaches

We initially tried simply increasing the number of alerts. This backfired spectacularly. The sheer volume of notifications overwhelmed the team, leading to alert fatigue and missed critical incidents. It was clear that we needed a more strategic approach to alerting. Another failed experiment was trying to build complex dashboards without a solid understanding of NRQL. We spent hours trying to create visualizations that didn’t accurately reflect the underlying data. This was a frustrating and time-consuming process. We quickly realized that we needed to invest in learning NRQL before we could create meaningful dashboards. If you’re struggling with performance issues, consider a tech performance audit.

The Measurable Result

By implementing these strategies, you can transform your New Relic deployment from a data dump into a powerful tool for proactive performance management. You’ll be able to identify and resolve issues faster, improve application performance, and ultimately, deliver a better user experience. The key is to move beyond the default settings and tailor New Relic to your specific needs and context. If you do, you will see fewer incidents, faster resolution times, and happier customers. That’s a win for everyone. For even more tips, check out this guide to finding and fixing performance bottlenecks. When you focus on performance testing you can stop waste and boost efficiency.

Don’t let your New Relic investment gather dust. Take action today to implement these strategies and unlock its full potential. Start by reviewing your instrumentation and identifying any gaps in your coverage. Even a small improvement can lead to significant results.