Fanzter & New Relic

By Joshua Warchol on 20 March 2012

As mentioned previously, Fanzter loves having great tools to help make our products better and help us maintain the creative fever. While fast laptops and big monitors are certainly nice, a less visible tool that I find indispensible is the application performance monitoring service from New Relic. It can be difficult to explain the comforting feeling of seeing my applications' performance in near real time, and then being able to slice and dice the data right down to the individual (rare) slow request.

Recently, I talked with Diane Davidson of New Relic about Fanzter's use of the service and how we've grown up along with it. New Relic was kind enough to compose a case study dubbed "Fanzter scores spot on performance with New Relic". It was quite interesting on our side to reflect upon how much this tool has meant to us over the years. If a site has a hiccup, it's the first place we turn to. Often New Relic is the source of the alert telling us something is wrong. And even when things are humming along, we've got the graphs up on our screens. Knowing what "normal" is for an app is critical to understanding what has happened when performance skews outside the norm.

As Ferris Bueller said, "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up."