New Relic gets even better. Developers rejoice.

By now, it’s no secret whatsoever that New Relic provides a phenomenal set of tools. They call their tools “X-Ray Vision For Developers,” and that’s almost an understatement. Here at AppFog, we like them so much that we offer New Relic support as a free add-on for PHP Fog apps hosted on dedicated clouds.

On Monday, New Relic announced that they’re improving their service by adding a new App Speed Index (for all users) and custom dashboards (for Pro customers):

App Speed Index: This feature, prominently nested in the upper left-hand corner of the main page, compares your site to others in the same peer group according to four measures: end user speed, general app speed, error rate, and availability. For each measure, your site is given a percentile rating vis-a-vis other sites in your chosen peer group. The menu used to select your peer group is clean and intuitive:

 
New Relic has even set up a site comparing the generalized App Speed Index for various categories of sites, updated once daily (!). They even list the top sites using New Relic within those categories (amongst sites that opt to be listed). As they like to say, this is Big Data turned into Big Insight. Very true.

Custom dashboard: This feature enables you to select which graphs appear on your monitoring dashboard and where, and all of this involves zero coding. It’s all just a clean drag-and-drop UI. Here’s an example:

This particular custom dashboard shows: (1) average response time from the browser, broken down by time spent on page rendering, DOM processing, the network, and the web app itself, respectively, (2) front-end response time for various widely-used browsers, (3) a listing of the slowest sub-domains for the site, and (4) MySQL database response times. Four panes holding almost unbelievable amounts of easily digestible information. Beautiful!

And because it’s New Relic, it’s all aesthetically appealing, deeply intuitive to the user, and full of attention to granular detail. Powerful stuff.

You have to love these folks, now even more than ever. We know we do.

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