New Relic today added the industry’s first free Application Speed Index to its SaaS application performance management (APM) tool, allowing organizations to compare their application performance to that of their peers in real-time, based on real user data. In addition, New Relic launched the first public Application Speed Index Leaderboard, a living infographic that tracks the fastest applications and industries using New Relic.

New Relic was founded in 2008 and since then over 140,000 developer, ops and devops personnel have opened accounts on the company’s APM platform. New Relic’s SaaS–delivered solution collects over 50 Billion metrics for its users each day from over 500,000 application instances that power 200,000 unique web domains on the Internet. This makes New Relic the largest big data repository for application performance metrics ever built. The App Speed Index represents the very first offering to benchmark a site’s user experience against its peers using real data from millions of global users.

• New Relic’s Application Speed Index allows companies to compare application performance, end user response time, application availability and error rate with that of their industry peers in real-time and trending over time.
• New Relic users who opt-in are given a percentile rank for each metric as well as daily histograms of their performance compared to that of their industry peers.
• Application Speed Index data is aggregated from New Relic’s 25,000+ customers and divided into industry categories including ecommerce, mobile, B2B and consumer internet, social networking and others.
• New Relic’s Application Speed Index Leaderboard is a public, living infographic that displays daily the fastest web applications by industry and illustrates how they compare to global benchmarks as well as the average response time of applications monitored by New Relic.
• In addition, this latest version of New Relic also adds drag-and-drop Custom Dashboards, enabling users to easily build their own view of application performance metrics, business metrics and KPIs for application components all in one location.

"At the end of the day, performance is really measured by the end user's experience, and application speed definitely influences their buying decisions. Right now, most companies measure speed and performance against their own subjective benchmarks, but they're operating in a vacuum because they don't have insight into how other companies in their industry compare. With New Relic's massive big data collection and our new app speed index capability, we're giving companies a huge competitive edge by providing a real benchmark that they can measure against day after day." Lew Cirne, founder & CEO of New Relic.

"Industry benchmarking is critical for helping companies understand how they compare with their peers. However, benchmarking reports are typically driven by synthetic transactions, which can assume connectivity that is often uncertain in today's mobile workforce. Newer approaches to application performance monitoring delivered as a service (APMaaS) can inject real user data into benchmarks adding valuable data for decision makers." Jonah Kowall, analyst at Gartner, Inc.

"The app speed index finally gives me concrete, objective data about how my app actually compares to other e-commerce sites. I fully expect our team to use this feature regularly to benchmark, and set goals for continued superior service delivery to our thousands of customers worldwide." Tobias Lutke, CEO of Shopify

New Relic App Speed Index is available today and automatically included in all New Relic editions. Users simply have to opt-in to the Application Speed Index service to begin benchmarking their application performance. Custom Dashboards are available for New Relic Pro users.

• Read more about the Application Performance Index on our blog.
• Check out who has the fastest app on the Application Speed Index Leaderboard.
• Sign up for New Relic with Application Performance Index.
• Watch a product overview video of the New Relic Application Performance Index.