Why New Relic
When Uptime Kuma tells me something is down, New Relic tells me why. It’s the step up from binary health checks to actual application performance monitoring — request traces, database query analysis, error tracking, and infrastructure metrics.
How I Use It
At KnausDev, I use New Relic on production Laravel applications where I need visibility beyond “is it responding.” Slow database queries, memory spikes, error rate trends, and deployment impact — that’s where New Relic earns its place in the stack.
The APM agent gives per-request traces through the full Laravel stack — middleware, controllers, Eloquent queries, queue jobs. On Exlink, this means tracing a request from the Vue 3 frontend through the multi-tenant PostgreSQL layer to pinpoint exactly which tenant schema or query is causing latency. When a client reports something is slow, I can find the exact query or service call causing it instead of guessing.
Synthetic monitoring adds the proactive layer — scripted checks that simulate user flows and catch problems before real users hit them. Combined with alerting, I know about issues before they become support tickets.
In the Stack
New Relic sits alongside Datadog and Uptime Kuma in KnausDev’s layered monitoring approach. Uptime Kuma handles the “is it alive” checks across everything. New Relic and Datadog handle the deeper observability for production applications that need it. k6 validates performance pre-deployment. Different tools for different depths of the same problem.