What
I use different monitoring and analytics tools to monitor my blog: Google Analytics, Vercel Analytics and New Relic. Maybe is too much, given that my blog doesn’t have a lot of traffic and it’s not a “critical system” to be continuously monitored and kept online (if it goes down for a couple of minutes no one will complain!). But since these services are free to use and since I use New Relic at work, I decided to use it for my blog and maybe to learn more about it.
But.. what is New Relic? Well, this is what I understood so far: New Relic is a monitoring tool that provides real-time data, usage analytics and allows you to monitor your services and to set alarms for them (imagine you want to receive a notification when one of your services goes down to be able to promptly respond to the failures). If you want a more specific definition of it, visit the official documentation.
I don’t monitor any service for my blog - I don’t have any! - but only the front end performances. And I do so with New Relic One.
Why
I do monitor my blog because I want to understand its performances and what I can do to improve it.
How
My blog is built with GatsbyJS so I used the plugin gatsby-plugin-newrelic. I won’t write here what I did to set up New Relic because there’s nothing their README doesn’t say. And it explains how to do it so well!
What I can add is that I monitor only my production environment. Here’s my configuration to monitor production.
Here you can see a part of my dashboard where I see data coming through.
Here you can see my blog’s FID , First Input Delay.
To put it in simpler terms, the FID is the delay between when you click or tap on something like a link or a button, and the time that the browser responds to your action and starts processing it.
I want to be honest: I can’t understand all of these charts yet. But that’s why I choose to monitor my blog with New Relic: I want to learn and become more familiar with it.
So don’t blame me if I’m not saying anything really interesting in this article. More interesting stuff will come, with time.
Conclusion
I started monitoring my blog a few days ago so, for now, there’s not so much I can say but New Relic looks good and very easy to use. It offers a lot of charts, analytics and alerts… Which I didn’t try yet!!
If you are searching for a good monitoring tool for your application, New Relic is what you need.
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