ps. I can view new relic on my phone, so if I get a pagerduty, I can still see what's up if I'm at the beach.
And I've been getting way too may false positives on the systems alerts.
If you only want systems monitoring and not deep application performance insight, New Relic is way too pricey and not really that good.
munin-monitoring.org
> not really that good
New relic has such rich functionality that it is easy to overlook some of its utility. It took us a while to get it tuned to our needs, but now that we have it configured, I couldn't imagine running a high availabilty web service with anything else. Suppose I get a pagerduty for high memory usage on a server. I would then go look at that server in new relic, see what processes are using the memory, see what the memory usage for that process has been like for the last 6 months, perhaps notice a slow steady increase in memory consumption, realize there's a memory leak, etc.
Or you can monitor your web-app using Appview Web too for synthetic monitoring. Plus you can monitor your network as well using Pathview.
If you're just starting out, the free tier is pretty good.
What the monitoring tools lack on specificity (and depending on your stack, it may provide varying levels of awesome -- server monitoring is weak but improving), it has massive win on zero-configuration installation.
Just sign up, instrument, and start monitoring.
If you find bits lacking, there are almost always local tools you can use to supplement.
We recently open source our Ruby instrumentation:
No server monitoring as of today though.