New Relic, the all-in-one observability platform for engineers, has launched New Relic Session Replay to provide engineers with vital context through a video-like playback feature to reproduce and resolve issues faster. 

With this, engineers gain a deeper understanding of users' interactions and optimise digital experiences with a granular view of telemetry data down to the code level. As an integrated capability of the New Relic all-in-one observability platform, engineers now have a cost-effective way to capture and scale the number of sessions while increasing data flow and driving new users to the New Relic platform.

According to the New Relic 2023 Observability Forecast, organisations see the value of observability, with 41% of respondents receiving more than US$1 million in total annual value.

Even so, many still experienced hurdles to achieving full-stack observability, citing challenges like it being too expensive (26%) or lacking a budget (25%). New Relic Session Replay solves that challenge by putting cost and value at the forefront as the affordable solution through the industry's first usage-based consumption pricing, with no new contracts or hidden fees - allowing engineering teams to scale confidently as user sessions and data volume increases.

The solution also extends the scope of New Relic Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities, including browser, mobile, and synthetic monitoring. It combines the power of full-stack and development cycle insights from New Relic APM 360. This helps engineers quickly identify and resolve issues with greater precision and efficiency for a more significant annual ROI. 

Strong data privacy and compliance measures like encryption and obfuscation are enabled by default, allowing engineers to analyse user interactions while keeping Personally Identifiable Information (PII) secure and protected.

Some of the key benefits and capabilities include playback and improved user experience. Users can quickly identify bottlenecks and pain points in the user journey with a detailed video-like playback of user actions.

They can access granular traces and error details to identify the exact code responsible for performance issues and get to the root cause faster. It helps understand complete front-end user behaviour and underlying factors by analysing user actions across your environment alongside code-level telemetry data from the New Relic platform. It protects users with client-side privacy obfuscation and encryption to ensure the privacy of their data. The platform will have the Generative AI assistance feature as well very soon.

“Finding the root cause of issues and customer pain points in modern digital businesses can be complicated and take a significant amount of time,” says Stephen Elliot, group vice president at IDC. 

“By leveraging a Session Replay capability, engineering teams can pinpoint where the issue happened and see how the customer responded, allowing them to fix issues faster and deliver a better customer experience. Even so, this can often be a hidden cost, so any solution that builds it into an existing product and makes it available on a consumption basis is a win for customers.”

“With New Relic Session Replay, we’re combining the power to play back user interactions with our unified telemetry and all-in-one observability platform, all without breaking the bank,” adds Manav Khurana, the chief product officer of New Relic. 

“By adding Session Replay into our existing platform, we’re providing our customers with the capabilities needed to create better, more consistent digital experiences while also ensuring an economic way for customers to scale their observability often at a fraction of the cost compared to other solutions.”

"Organisations in Asia Pacific continue to experience more frequent high-business-impact outages than any other region. Our research reveals that engineering teams continue to struggle with speed, cost and complexity in identifying and resolving issues that can cripple digital experiences for users," says Rob Newell, vice president of customer adoption for APJ at New Relic. 

"The introduction of Session Replay enables developers and engineers to extract important context and get to the bottom of these issues faster, more cost-effectively and ultimately deliver greater gains in application availability."

New Relic Session Replay is now available to users worldwide in a limited preview and is included as part of New Relic's consumption pricing.