Introducing Performance Risks Inbox

The life of a modern software engineer is often a paradox. You are hired to be a builder, to architect elegant solutions and ship features that drive the business forward. Yet, research and reality suggest that a staggering amount of your time is actually spent as a firefighter. You are pulled out of your normal flow by 3:00 AM pages, emergency war rooms, and the high-stakes pressure of an outage that is already impacting users.

The problem isn't that you aren't monitoring your systems. You likely have dashboards for everything. The problem is that traditional monitoring is reactive. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is excellent at telling you when a service is currently down or when an error rate has spiked. But by the time an alert fires, the damage to the customer experience and the business's bottom line is already done.

Engineering teams have long been haunted by "silent killers"—coding anti-patterns like N+1 queries, slow SQL queries, and excessive database queries that degrade performance slowly over time before eventually cascading into a system-wide failure. Detecting these requires manual investigation, deep expertise, and a bit of luck. Until now.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Performance Risks Inbox, now in preview, a proactive, intelligence-led workflow that detects, groups, and prioritizes critical coding anti-patterns before they trigger an alert. It’s about moving from asking, "Is this a problem?" to knowing exactly which fix will deliver the most value for your business right now.

The "Aha" Moment Before the 3:00 AM Page

Modern software environments are filled with a nearly unmanageable number of clouds, microservices, and dependencies. This complexity creates a visibility gap where performance risks stay hidden between the layers of your stack.

Platform Managers and SREs often struggle with these core challenges:

1. Reactive Firefighting: Issues are only identified after customer experiences are compromised.
2. Preventing Outages: It is difficult to spot and group critical coding issues, such as N+1 queries, slow SQL queries, and excessive database queries, before they cascade into business-impacting outages.
3. Actionable Context: Errors don’t often provide the information necessary to guide you toward a solution by providing actionable context.
4. Manual Toil: Investigating performance problems is time-consuming. Engineers spend hours hunting for the bug behind the bug, rather than the much more valuable and rewarding work of building new features.

Performance Risks Inbox eliminates these gaps by analyzing the rich, correlated telemetry New Relic already collects across your full stack, from mobile and browser to your hosts and databases. It surfaces the "aha" moments in your data, putting them in one opinionated place for you to triage during normal working hours.

Proactive Intelligence for the Full Stack

Performance Risks Inbox isn't just a new dashboard or collection of messages, it’s an intelligence layer that transforms how you manage application stability.

Proactive Anti-Pattern Detection

The Inbox automatically spots the silent killers of stability. By looking for specific signatures in your traces and metrics, it identifies:

• N+1 Queries: Identifying where a single request triggers a cascade of unnecessary database calls.
• Slow SQL Queries: Pinpointing inefficient queries that are dragging down transaction times.
• Excessive database queries: Detecting loops where failed requests trigger immediate retries, potentially toppling downstream services.

Full-Stack Telemetry Correlation

Siloed point solutions often miss the hidden anti-patterns that live between the layers of your stack. Because New Relic ingests telemetry across the entire system, we can trace a slow query back to its true root cause. We connect code-level performance to infrastructure health, replacing "gaps and guesses" with high-confidence signals.

Opinionated Remediation Workflows

We don't just point out the problem, we guide you to the solution. The workflow provides actionable context immediately, enabling you to move from identification to remediation in minutes, not hours.

Protecting the Bottom Line

Performance Risks Inbox delivers measurable impact by transforming your engineering organization from a reactive firefighting unit into a proactive, high-value optimization team.

Protect Your Engineering Flow

Engineers are most valuable when they are in their creative flow. By resolving performance risks during normal hours, you remove the obstacles that pull teams into emergency meetings. This reduces burnout and keeps the focus on innovation.

Reduce the Cost of Downtime

Unchecked performance risks frequently cascade into expensive outages. By surfacing these signals early, you protect revenue and avoid the high stakes of emergency downtime. You shift the culture from responding to fires to preventing the spark.

Unified Visibility beats Siloed Guesses

Using a single, opinionated workflow replaces the assumptions that occur when data is trapped in disconnected tools. It provides a source of truth that connects developers, SREs, and IT Operations, leading to faster root-cause analysis and more stable software.

Why New Relic?

The market for performance detection is evolving, but New Relic’s approach remains unique.

• Vs. Developer-First Tools (e.g., Sentry): While these tools are great for error tracing, they often lack the deep, full-stack infrastructure context needed to find the "bug behind the bug" in complex distributed systems.
• Vs. Broad Platforms (e.g., Datadog): Many platforms provide a "bag of metrics" that requires human-led investigation. New Relic moves beyond simple visualization toward an intelligence-led, proactive model that tells you why something is about to happen before it does.
• Vs. Niche Tools: Simplified tools lack the sophisticated AI and the correlated telemetry that New Relic provides at enterprise scale.

Spend More Time Shipping, Less Time Troubleshooting

You shouldn't have to wait for an alert to fire to know your code is struggling. Performance Risks Inbox washes away the doubt and operational noise that stalls projects. It empowers you to stay in your flow, prioritize what matters most, and maintain a decisive competitive edge.

By shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive optimization, you aren't just fixing bugs—you are protecting the future of your business.

Ready to see the silent killers in your code? Join the preview to start exploring how New Relic Performance Risks Inbox allows your team to spend less time troubleshooting and more time shipping.