New Relic monitoring

New Relic allows you to monitor sites by installing a New Relic daemon onto the webserver, which sends then monitoring data in real-time to your dashboard on the New Relic site. This is very cool, but still requires you to modify the hosting environment - you need root-level access to your server. If you're on a shared hosting environment and your hosting provider hasn't installed New Relic, forget about this. But if you have your own VPS or dedicated server, and you're keen to improve performance, this is for you.

The free New Relic package is pretty basic, it allows you to monitor your site, and the graphics split out performance over subgroups like database and PHP. Extra variable-monitoring is not included. But when you move up to the paid subscriptions, there are numerous options for you to benchmark things and to monitor specific parts of your Joomla! application.

Our New Relic plugin

Our New Relic plugin for Joomla! allows you to configure the license and application name within the plugin-settings, which is already useful when you're using the free New Relic package on a server with many applications. Additionally, extra variables like the username and the Joomla! component (responsible for the current page) can be traced, but for this the commercial packages are needed. It's simple, it's free and it is a neccessity when running Joomla! and New Relic together.