[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSdo_3eyuTQ&w=560&h=315&wmode=window&h=315]

Why is the application slow? Is it the crappy network or is it the crappy code? Do you blame the IT guy or the developer? If you’re looking at both, you won’t have to blame anyone. You’ll be able to find the problem and fix it, quickly. Such is the hopeful promise of New Relic, an Application Performance Management Software as a Service solution designed to help you find bottlenecks and run efficiently. In the above video, Michael Redman, Solution Architect for New Relic, gives us a demo of watching the behavior of a Ruby on Rails application over the network. In the example, you can see that traffic is broken down into separate areas: Ruby, garbage collection, memcache, and external calls, said Redman. If you have performance issues, those problems will bubble up to the top. If the issue lies in the code, you can drill down and see which specific line of code is slowing down the entire application. You can also see if it’s an anomaly or if it’s happening a lot. If you’re not a developer, you’ll still see what’s wrong and can leave notes for developers, said Redman. FULL DISCLOSURE: I just began shooting and writing for New Relic’s blog.