When they changed their billing to be per user our bill went up 20x for no additional value. Unfortunately I haven't found a better APM product that ticks all the boxes yet. I don't care about anything else but they don't understand that. And APM hasn't seen a single new feature in the 5 years I have used it. Stop taking my money to develop features I don't care about.
A fancy APM UI isn’t worth it to tolerate these dark business patterns which they try (or just do) all the time IMO.
We didn’t regret the decision.
“Glad we could help! Just remember to continue making regular payments.”
There are other options out there, but surprisingly few open source ones. I know APM is hard, but...
In a high-throughput distributed system, traces start being mostly noise due to random latency spikes which are usually not very interesting.
NewRelic is a lot more focused on the average but it breaks it down nicely so that you know where to start optimizing code. I rarely look at the p95 traces to do that.
New relic collects a lot of data but it really is a lot of noise. We dropped new relic because it kept modifying requests in one of apis that caused the result api to be corrupted and new relic ghosted us when unable to fix it.
A real APM cares more about profiling program execution than it does HTTP requests. I need to see function calls, not just HTTP requests.
(disclosure: I work for Sentry)
Edit: I looked at the docs, Sentry still has a sample rate parameter so this product can't give you the same results. With NewRelic I can have 100M transaction per day and then I have a single different transaction once every day and I can be sure that the agent will pick it up - always. With sampling you don't get that. Tracing gets you more depth but I seldom need that, I want APM and I only need tracing for a very very low percentage of transactions.
edit: We had to resort to using APM on a portion of the farm but this allowed us to use it on all of it and finding issues was way faster. Incidents by level 1 were resolved faster as well and that was huge for global teams SLA.
APM is the product which got them off the ground, now they hardly care about it. Yet they have no problem raising prices beyond 10x for certain usage patterns. And its not really negotiable either. I understand that they want to make money, but we are paying hundreds of thousands more, not just a few thousands. And we get exactly the same product we had 5 years ago.
People are equally annoyed about the Datadog pricing model but at least there, I don't pay for what I don't use and I only pay for data ingested. NewRelic has the per user pricing model for one single reason: They want to upsell everything else on their platform because you are already paying for the users. Ingesting logs by default is just another way of costumer unfriendly upselling.