What is New Relic?

New Relic is a suite of tools that enable technical monitoring of our infrastructure. It provides a clear overall view of our stack at all levels from front-end to code performance, enabling us to identify any issues or bottlenecks as soon as they occur.

Why do we use it?

New Relic allows us to debug, find problems and be able to see (across all layers of our stack) where performance needs improving. It showcases how different parts of our infrastructural code are interacting with each other – a valuable insight for ensuring our system is as efficient as possible. 

For example, when a page is visited, New Relic shows us each database request and how that links to the page. These insights enable us to refactor continually – ensuring that our system is accessing what is stored in the database as efficiently as possible.

How does New Relic fit into our release cycle?

During our release cycle, we use New Relic as one of the tools from which we generate our performance reports for our customers – enabling them to see the changing performance of the product, release-to-release. It is also vital for our QA (quality assurance) team, not just to ensure that functionality is working as expected, but that everything is working as efficiently as possible.

It also provides them with the ability to monitor the loading and rendering of web pages, meaning they can track whether code changes are improving performance. These steps ensure that our customers have successful experiences with their intranets.