Restoring Access to New Relic

This post is to provide an update about New Relic, and the steps we’ve taken to restore access.

A Brief History

In October 2020, New Relic was temporarily disabled on all sites across the VIP Go Platform due to performance issues. Our team, in coordination with engineers from New Relic, were able to narrow down the issues and as of November 13th, we had an update that brought the performance cost of enabling New Relic to within the expected range of 10–12% impact on response times, with the framework-specific options disabled.

Next Steps

Our teams have continued to work on improvements, and soon, we’ll have an update to the New Relic PHP agent that allows for most of the framework-specific functionality to be enabled without any additional performance impact. In the next iteration, the New Relic agent will ignore only the lib directory of our VIP Go MU Plugins, but the rest of the framework options, including the WordPress-specific functionality will be restored.

We expect to deploy the updated New Relic PHP agent in the last week of February. For anyone who has already requested to have New Relic re-enabled since November, your applications will automatically receive the updated New Relic agent as soon as it’s released.

Moving forward, New Relic will remain available for all VIP Go sites, but will be enabled upon request, and offered during the onboarding process for any new customers as part of a plan to meet specific monitoring objectives. We’ve updated our documentation to reflect the change.

Please open a support ticket if you’d like New Relic re-enabled on any of your environments or have any additional questions, and we’ll be happy to assist.