New Relic is a SaaS solution for monitoring application transactions, alerting errors and showing JVM stats. New Relic supports a lot of Java frameworks and app servers out-of-the-box.

In order to use New Relic you have to create an account, download and install javaagent for each app server on your environment. Once your app is up and running it starts to send monitoring data to New Relic servers.

New Relic UI is nice and full of values and plots so your business people will appreciate it very much. Obviously in order to use New Relic SaaS solution you must be ok with exposing your apps data to the internet which is not a case for my customers. Also you must provide connectivity from javaagents to the Internet which could be a challenge for well-secured environments. I couldn't find any reference to on-premise version of New Relic but I believe it exists and it's not cheap. The price for New Relic SaaS solution is a mystery too.

I've found New Relic is very similar to 2 other monitoring tools on the market - AppDynamics and Optier - so if you like SaaS approach and you are ok with instrumenting your apps and sending your monitoring data to the Internet then you should have a look at AppDynamics and Optier as well.

Wish you a golden day,

Vladimir Krasilschik @ Kupchino Labs,
Saint-Petersburg, Russia

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