New Relic, Inc., the leading software-as-a-service provider of application performance management (APM) solutions, today announced that its flagship product RPM now includes powerful new features for monitoring the performance of Apache Solr, the open source search engine from the Lucene project, which is emerging as a new standard for web application search. Additionally, New Relic has partnered with leading Solr experts and services providers to make RPM available to their clients during customer engagements. Now, development and operations teams can use a single, proven tool to troubleshoot and tune Solr deployments and Solr-connected Java and Ruby web applications.

"Tuning Solr is hit or miss without good feedback," said Jeremy Kemper of 37signals, a leading provider of web-based collaboration, project management, and data sharing applications. "RPM Solr monitoring kept us on the fast path as we optimized indexer and searcher replication."

"Apache Solr is a powerful alternative to traditional search technologies — a robust, enterprise-class solution that can be deployed easily and scales rapidly," said Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination, the commercial company dedicated to Lucene/Solr open source solutions. "New Relic RPM’s deep, real-time visibility into Solr-based search applications gives our customers and partners a vital tool to help them achieve high performance and availability. We are pleased to be working with New Relic and look forward to introducing RPM to our customers and the fast-growing Lucene/Solr marketplace."

"Among the more than 4,000 customers that we serve today, we’ve seen an increasing number of Solr deployments connected to Java and Ruby on Rails front ends," said Jim Gochee, New Relic’s vice president of engineering. "With Solr becoming such a critical component of the application infrastructure, we made the decision to provide our customers with additional visibility into Solr, as well as the connected applications, within one unified solution, making it easier to manage overall application health and availability."

Increasing Adoption of Apache Solr

Apache Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. It features powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. The Lucene search library currently ranks among the top 15 open source projects and is one of the top 5 Apache projects, with installations at over 4,000 companies. Apache Solr downloads have grown nearly 10x over the past three years, with a current run-rate of well over 7,000 downloads a day. The Solr search server, which provides application builders a ready-to-use search platform on top of the Lucene search library, is the fastest growing Lucene sub-project.

New Relic RPM is an application performance management solution that allows operations and development teams to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize their production Java and Ruby web applications. RPM tracks transaction response time, customer satisfaction, database performance, and more, while also providing deep, code-level diagnostics. RPM now offers those same capabilities for Apache Solr and monitors key performance indicators such as overall Solr performance, cache hit rate and cache size, document cache and filter cache, and Solr update handlers with special tracking of index operations and document operations. RPM provides deep, transaction-level visibility into individual Solr queries, allowing IT teams to identify and remediate potential issues before they affect end users.

Partnering with the Solr Community

Due to the rapidly increasing adoption of Apache Solr, New Relic has teamed with leading experts in the Solr community to provide RPM to organizations that are deploying Solr’s powerful search capabilities. Customers of these partners are eligible to use New Relic RPM at no charge for 30 days to eliminate potential performance issues at the time of deployment and beyond.

Members of New Relic’s Solr Partner Program include:

Lucid Imagination, the commercial company exclusively dedicated to commercial-grade support, training, high-level consulting and value-add software for Lucene and Solr, along with its network of partners including:

• Findwise.se, a consultancy that focuses on creating competitive value by using search technology for finding and using the right information at the right time.
• OpenSource Connections, which specializes in data management solutions, web-based application development, and technology consulting.
• JTeam, a team of expert consultants and developers specializing in content management, enterprise search, e-commerce platforms, and custom development.

Other leading Solr specialists joining New Relic’s partner program are:

• Doculibre, a consulting firm that focuses on information management, search engines and content management.
• Mindheap Technology, Inc., a provider of technology strategy and system architecture consulting that provides pragmatic answers and creative thinking to large data processing and data retrieval problems.
• Sematext, a leading provider of consulting and development services for Lucene, Solr, Nutch, and Hadoop.

New Relic’s performance management capabilities for Apache Solr server are available today. Learn more about monitoring web applications including Apache Solr here.

About New Relic RPM

New Relic RPM is an on-demand performance management solution for web applications developed in Ruby, Java or JRuby. New Relic RPM is fully implemented in minutes and provides deep, 24x7 visibility and code-level diagnostics for web applications deployed on traditional, dedicated infrastructures, private and public clouds, or any combination thereof. RPM’s real-time metrics enable application owners, developers and operations teams to quickly and cost effectively monitor, troubleshoot, and tune application performance. Learn more about RPM and subscribe