[LRUG] [Help] Alternatives to NewRelic

[Sam Phillips]

We're heavy users of New Relic and keeping costs down has been tough. Two
things we've done to help:

* Configure chef to only deploy and activate NR on certain members of
clusters where each member is identical. I know this adds a complexity but
it hasn't caused problems for us, at all.

* Talk to them about getting a pre-production account set up. This is
included in our package as a value add and allows us to put sandbox/staging
instances in an account that has good data retention, but doesn't count
against our allowance for production machines.

As an overall comment, we operate our architecture on clusters, with
components clustered together. I.e., X service always shares with Y
service. Once resources get contended, we either upgrade the boxes or break
out a component into its own cluster. When we first designed our arch we
envisaged having a cluster per service, with no sharing... but this means
LOTS of boxes and the complexity of sharing isn't too bad at all. And of
course, this helps with costs like New Relic :)

Cheers,

Sam

On 28 May 2015 at 15:24, Ben Lovell <benjamin.lovell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 28 May 2015 at 15:21, Frederick Cheung <frederick.cheung at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I don’t have any answers for you but very keen to see what others are
>> going as we’re in a similar position. We’re on a non longer existent new
>> relic plan which doesn’t quite have the features we need but the
>> $199/host/month pricing on new relic is super high (and it seems like it’s
>> getting more rather than less expensive over time). The per host price
>> aspect is also pulling us in the opposite direction that we want to go in.
>>
>>
> Speak to somebody at newrelic. I've always found them very (very) amenable
> to negotiation where price is concerned.
>
>
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>
>> On 28 May 2015 at 14:03:06, Seb Jacobs (seb.jacobs at futurelearn.com)
>> wrote:
>>
>>  Hello all,
>>
>> At FutureLearn we have been using NewRelic since before we launched back
>> in October 2013,
>> however it's getting to the point where we can no longer justify paying
>> for NewRelic.
>>
>> * What do we currently use NewRelic for? *
>>
>> + Identifying slow controller actions/SQL queries
>> + Monitoring slow background jobs
>> + Identifying deployments which may have effected specific page
>> generation times.
>> + Monitoring page generation times
>> + Monitoring page load times
>> + Monitoring general throughput and servers (used for Capacity planning)
>>
>> I am currently in the process of evaluating alternative services to
>> NewRelic, and although in theory a combination of services such as
>> AppSignal, Skylight.io and ServerDensity might be able to meet the more
>> general use cases I have been unable to find any which feel quite right.
>>
>> I was wondering if any fellow LRUGers have come across any NewRelic-like
>> services which fit these particular needs, and work out cheaper overall.
>>
>> It might be worth noting that we are currently hesitant to go down the
>> path of reducing the number of instances running NewRelic as this will make
>> our infrastructure considerably more complicated to manage.
>>
>> Any help would be much appreciated.
>>
>> --
>>
>>     Seb Jacobs
>> Web Developer
>> FutureLearn
>> E: seb.jacobs at futurelearn.com <james.coglan at futurelearn.com>
>>
>> Follow us @FutureLearn
>> www.futurelearn.com
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