New Relic Adds Real User Monitoring

New Relic adds real user monitoring to its SAAS-based application performance management solution.

New Relic has announced the release of real user monitoring as part of its core SAAS, or software as a service, application performance management offering.

New Relic Real User Monitoring measures key front-end metrics from the moment a user request is initiated in the application, to the final loading of the resulting Web page, the company said. "It is one of the first commercial implementations of technology built on the Episodes framework for measuring Web page load times developed by Steve Souders, the author of the High Performance Web Sites book and blog by the same name.

"With the addition of Real User Monitoring as a core capability of their solution, New Relic has taken a pivotal next step in the evolution of its on-demand Web application performance management service," Rona Shuchat, program director for application outsourcing services at IDC, said in a statement. "As more and more organizations migrate to the cloud, providing deep visibility into applications and real user experiences becomes highly critical. The advantage of having an integrated offering that combines these capabilities can provide enormous value to development and operations teams, as well as the platform providers who all have a stake in application performance and end-user satisfaction."

"By offering real user monitoring within our all-in-one SAAS offering for free, we are continuing our mission of disrupting the status quo within the application management industry," Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic, said in a statement. "In the cloud era, we believe traditional monitoring models are extinct. Our customers are looking for easy-to-use offerings that provide real-time views into their performance, and this product release extends their visibility to the end-user within minutes of deployment."

For each page request, New Relic captures network time, time in the application itself and time spent rendering the Web page, the company said. It also tracks the type and version of browser, operating system and geographic location of the user. Moreover, development and operations teams can now gain valuable, real-time insight into browser response time and measure user satisfaction from both the end-user and application perspectives, as well as determine if performance bottlenecks are located in the front end, the application or connected systems, New Relic officials said.

"As the leading cloud-based help desk, our competitive advantage is that we are the fastest way to enable great customer service. Since performance is so critical to the success of both Zendesk and our customers, we chose New Relic to optimize Zendesk and to prevent performance bottlenecks before they happen," said Zack Urlocker, chief operating officer at Zendesk. "Real User Monitoring is a real breakthrough."

The New Relic Real User Monitoring is fully integrated with New Relic's existing application performance management technology, offering a complete view of application performance in a single user interface that is easy to understand and use, the company said.

"Current monitoring solutions take an outside-in approach to end-user monitoring, relying on synthetic transactions and pingers to approximate user behavior," Cirne said. "These approaches can be good for telling you if your site is up at 3 a.m. in a distant part of the world, but they are no substitute for the ability to tell you what users are actually doing, and we are delivering that capability today."

"Web app builders and owners care about their user's experience," Dries Buytaert, co-creator of Drupal and chief technology officer at Acquia, said in a statement. "The fact is, speed matters. Seeing exactly what real users are experiencing in a Web app or Website provides tremendous value for both platform providers and their customers. New Relic lets any company gain critical visibility into Web performance with immediate time to value."

Moreover, David Ting, vice president of engineering at IGN Entertainment, said, "It is very hard to predict how users will actually use your application. When you create and release a new feature, it's almost impossible to know which use case will be the most popular. Real user monitoring from New Relic allows our developers to focus on the features that our users actually use. By doing so, we get faster and more agile as a company."