They also give you downtime notifications if your server goes offline for more than a few minutes. Not only is the service free, but they give you a free T-shirt.
They have application monitoring tools as well, which they are monetizing. I'm very happy with the product.
What's Ducksboard?
We are constantly adding and removing servers based on our traffic, and with something like New Relic we need to renegotiate or change contract if we suddenly needs a lot of servers. Pay by metric, pay by request etc. is fairer in my eyes. If I have 10 servers connnected and send 1 request-per-minute I still pay for having 10 servers connected.
If they process 1 request from me it shouldn't matter whether or not I have 1 or 10 servers connected, I should only pay for what they process.
The reason I am not using NewRelic personally is that my infrastructure is 5 linodes, which I pay $20 for each server. And with NewRelic Pro I have to pay $149 per host. I have seen people doing tricks like only enabling NewRelic for certain hosts just to get around their pricing model.
I really like New Relic, and its very pleasant to use their service, they give good insight about your application, I just wish I could afford their service.
They've got a good foothold in the market as a all-in-one solution. I've attempted to find a drop-in replacement, without much luck. It's difficult to find a one-for-one service, but here's some similar services with entry-level pricing:
DataDog (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/): $15/host/month up to 100 hosts.
Scout (https://scoutapp.com/subscriptions): $10/host/month
CopperEgg (http://copperegg.com/pricing/): A la carte depending on service
Stackify (http://www.stackify.com/pricing/): $15/host/month
The biggest feature that I need is application level monitoring for PHP. There's plenty of great server monitoring tools, but not many services that track application performance like New Relic does.
I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?
Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative service.
AppNeta TraceView is an alternative to New Relic: http://www.appneta.com/products/traceview/
Disclosure: I work for AppNeta.
That was also my conclusion, if you look at the list of companies that uses them you will get a list of some very big businesses. And they can probably afford it, which is good for NewRelic.
> I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?
You could probably use their software, and build a collector for the data, but that doesn't really solve the issue of not building an alternative service.
Yehuda Katz have built Skylight (https://www.skylight.io/) for Ruby performance metrics and they do charge for the number of requests, the platform isn't there yet, but they are improving a lot. Their newsletters are a good read :-)
This is an understatement. $149/month/host is crazy if you're using anything other than the largest AWS instances, for example - a c3.large is $16.11/month with a reservation.
I work for New Relic, obviously :)
The problem I have with that argument is that the number of hours New Relic saves me isn't really related to the number of instances I'm running. If I've got 10 AWS medium instances and I swap them out for 30 AWS micro instances, my NR cost just tripled but its utility to me likely didn't.
https://profiler.qafoolabs.com/
We are still in closed beta but not for long anymore. You can sign up for our waiting list if you are interested to hear more.
As for the pricing, we are working on a model that is not per server/host.
With that said, I’ve used their services for years and without question for my group the monitoring pays for itself in improved efficiency of developers and operations. Last year we moved from the free service to the enterprise service that gives us 12 app-servers (in our case 12 deployed Rails docker-Containers) for about $500 a month.
We have docker nodes that spin up and down frequently for one of the rails apps we use for monitoring and it can at times create what appears to be more instances than what we physically have.
Their free service I believe is good enough for many use cases, and you can monitor an unlimited number of hosts/services outside of the “application” monitoring. I looked at scout and a few other monitoring services, and as much as I like their pricing model, the product just doesn’t compare to new-relic.
You can see the first shot at a revision like this with the pricing restructure on heroku that we announced last december:
http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/12/04/new-relic-announces-new-...
Your complaint is totally reasonable and NR is hoping to address it soon!
Supported technologies: https://ruxit.com/ruxit/supportedtechnologies.html
We have pretty cool technology to correlate events into bigger buckets (problems).It is based on tracking of each individual transaction flow through the stack plus discovery of infrastructure topology and performance.
[Edit:spelling ]
Think like the Panic dashboard but reconfigurable with as many data sources as Zapier supports APIs.
I'm sorry if you didn't like the terse and flippant way that I expressed that.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, though. I see that your account is less than a month old (hint: click on the user name and you can see the same about me).