New Relic
Full-stack observability platform with AI-assisted anomaly detection, alerting, and root cause analysis.
What it does
New Relic is a full-stack observability platform covering application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, browser and mobile monitoring, log management, and distributed tracing. Its AI capabilities include New Relic AI, a natural language interface that lets engineers query telemetry data and diagnose issues using plain English, anomaly detection that automatically baselines normal behavior and alerts on deviations, and AI-powered alert correlation that groups related alerts into incidents to reduce noise. New Relic's consumption-based pricing model - where teams pay only for the data they ingest and users they provision - makes it more accessible than traditional per-host pricing for smaller engineering teams.
Strengths
- Mid-market engineering organizations use New Relic for full-stack observability - correlating application performance with infrastructure and logs in a single platform with AI surfacing anomalies before they become incidents.
- Large engineering teams use New Relic for observability at scale - distributed tracing across microservices, AI-powered incident management, and unified dashboards across cloud and on-premise environments.
- Small engineering teams use New Relic's free tier for APM and infrastructure monitoring - the 100GB/month free data allowance covering most small application monitoring needs.
Watch-outs
- Data ingestion costs escalate quickly: New Relic's consumption model is accessible at low volumes but can produce large bills at scale — high-cardinality metrics, verbose logs, and distributed tracing data ingest fast and cost proportionally.
- Alert configuration complexity: Setting up meaningful, low-noise alerting in New Relic requires investment in baseline tuning — out-of-the-box alerts often produce too many notifications before teams configure proper thresholds.
- Competes with more specialized tools: Teams already invested in specialized tools — Datadog for infrastructure or Dynatrace for AI root cause analysis — often find New Relic's breadth less compelling than a deeper specialized tool.
Pricing
Free tier includes 100GB data ingest/month and 1 free full-platform user. Data ingest at $0.35/GB beyond free tier. Full-platform users at $99/month. Core users at $49/month. Basic users free. Commitment discounts available.