New Relic

Overview

As much as cloud computing is an evolution of how information technology gets delivered, it's also a convergence of factors that are technological as much as cultural. An example of this is the dramatic increase in the use of Ruby and Ruby on Rails by web developers. Geva Perry hit on this when he called Ruby and Rails developers part of the "cloud generation" - those who have completely skipped the traditional on-premise development lifecycle and opted for cloud computing platforms like Engine Yard and Heroku.

As a result, there's been a greater need for performance management tools for Ruby on Rails applications. And that's exactly the audience New Relic targeted with its on-demand application performance monitoring and management solution. More recently, the company added support for Java applications.

Because it was designed for cloud computing, it has some interesting advantages. For example, it can monitor and manage applications in the cloud, whether public or private, as well as applications deployed in the data center. Yet, it runs natively regardless of the application deployment model. Customers can choose from three subscription plans: montly, annually, or pay-as-you-go. Users can get up and running in two minutes and, then using a well-designed user interface, monitor any number of applications, spot trouble and begin fixing them. I have seen New Relic RPM in action and I can verify that it's impressive. Apparently, customers feel the same way - in two years the company has grabbed 2,500 of them.

Value Proposition

New Relic RPM helps customers to easily monitor and manage production applications, quickly identify root cause problems and proactively fix them. And does so without adding overhead or degrading the performance of the application itself, so users can constantly monitor the health of their applications and resolve performance bottlenecks, often before they effect the end-user's experience.

Delivered on-demand, customers don't have to worry about the associated costs for software and infrastructure and it can be used to monitor apps wherever they get deployed - in the cloud or in the data center.

Products & Services

• New Relic RPM is an on-demand performance management solution for applications written in Ruby, Java and JRuby. It's used to monitor and manage applications in any environment, whether a public cloud (e.g. Amazon EC2), a private cloud, or in the data center. RPM comes in four product levels starting with a free version for Basic Monitoring and moving to Troubleshooting, then Diagnosis and Tuning and, finally, Proactive Optimization. Designed to run natively in the cloud it is easy to set up and use, regardless of deployment option. Pricing options are annual, monthly or pay-as-you-go.