New Relic Launches Real User Monitoring

User experience and infrastructure performance monitoring integrated

New Relic, a SaaS application performance management (APM) solution supplier, today announced the extension of their response time visibility into the browser. New Relic customers can now see an end-to-end view of response time from the browser, through the network, the server, and services behind the server.

New Relic supports Ruby on Rails, PHP, JAVA and .NET platforms, and we are told that support for additional platforms is on the horizon. New Relic started with deep application visibility from a small agent installed in the server. This new monitoring capability extends that visibility to where it really matters --the end user. Since New Relic measures within browsers connected to customer servers, the resulting data follows users' actual website interactions from anywhere in the world.

We have long contended that as client hardware, browsers, and applications running within browsers proliferate, the only reliable place to understand the user experience is the browser--and that browser instrumentation must occur without user intervention.  

New Relic provides a wide range of views starting with a dashboard that reports in real time how long it takes for: request queuing, web application, network time, DOM processing, and page rendering as seen below.

Installation is seamless for existing New Relic customers because the small agent in the server already performs server and back-end measurements. That agent now injects two tiny asynchronous snippets of JavaScript into instrumented pages. The initial snippet marks when the "first byte" of the page is received. The second snippet responds to the "page loaded" event (which is slightly different across various browser rendering engines) and marks that time as well. These and a few other metrics are passed back to the New Relic Beacon service, which processes the metrics and associates them with the customer's account.

New Relic's browser-based monitoring also supports the Apdex reporting standard as shown the following screen shot. They have used Apdex to report server data for some time. We will have more on New Relic's use of Apdex in future blogs.

With an installed base of about 10,000 customers, New Relic has a history of large scale real-time APM monitoring. The new real user monitoring feature is part of all the company's service packages, including its free "lite" package.

Learn more about New Relics' Real User Monitoring (RUM) here.

• Application Management
• Apdex
• APM
• RUM