New Relic
MonitoringFull-stack observability platform
New Relic offers the most generous free tier in observability (100GB/month, full platform access) with a unified query language that works across all telemetry types, making full-stack observability accessible without upfront commitment.
New Relic is a full-stack observability platform with a generous free tier that includes 100GB of data per month. It covers APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management, and browser monitoring in one platform.
Reviewed by the AI Tools Hub editorial team · Last updated February 2026
New Relic — In-Depth Review
New Relic is a full-stack observability platform that provides monitoring across applications, infrastructure, logs, browsers, mobile apps, and serverless functions. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne — who previously founded Wily Technology (acquired by CA Technologies for $375 million) — New Relic was one of the earliest SaaS-based application performance monitoring (APM) tools. The company went public in 2014 and was taken private by Francisco Partners and TPG in 2023 for $6.5 billion. With over 16,000 customers including major enterprises, New Relic has reinvented itself from a traditional APM vendor into a comprehensive observability platform with a disruptive usage-based pricing model.
APM and Distributed Tracing
New Relic APM provides deep visibility into application performance across Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and PHP. It automatically instruments popular frameworks, tracking response times, throughput, error rates, and database query performance. Distributed tracing follows requests across microservices boundaries, visualizing the full journey of a request through your architecture. The "Errors Inbox" centralizes errors from all your services into a single triage workflow, grouping similar errors and tracking their lifecycle from detection to resolution. CodeStream integration brings observability data directly into IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains, letting developers see production telemetry alongside their code.
Infrastructure and Kubernetes Monitoring
New Relic Infrastructure monitors hosts, containers, and cloud services with an agent that collects system metrics and integrates with over 500 technologies. Kubernetes cluster monitoring provides pre-built dashboards showing pod health, resource utilization, and cluster events. The Kubernetes cluster explorer visualizes namespaces, deployments, and pods in an interactive interface that makes it easy to spot resource-starved containers or failing pods. Cloud integrations pull metrics directly from AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Google Cloud Monitoring without requiring agents on every resource.
Log Management and NRQL
New Relic's log management platform ingests logs and correlates them with traces and infrastructure metrics using "logs in context." When you view a distributed trace, you see the logs generated during that specific transaction, eliminating manual log searching. NRQL (New Relic Query Language) is a SQL-like query language that works across all telemetry types — metrics, events, logs, and traces. NRQL powers custom dashboards, alerts, and data exploration, and its familiar SQL-like syntax makes it accessible to anyone who has written a database query. This unified query language across all data types is one of New Relic's strongest differentiators.
Browser and Mobile Monitoring
New Relic Browser monitors real user experience in web applications, capturing page load times, JavaScript errors, AJAX call performance, and Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS). Session traces replay user interactions leading to errors. New Relic Mobile extends this to iOS and Android apps, tracking crashes, HTTP errors, network failures, and app launch times. Both feed into the same platform, so you can trace a user experience issue from the browser through your API gateway to the backend database query that caused the slowdown.
Pricing: The Usage-Based Model
New Relic disrupted the monitoring market in 2020 by switching to pure usage-based pricing. The free tier is genuinely useful: one full-access user, 100GB of data ingest per month, and access to the entire platform with no feature restrictions. Paid plans charge per GB of data ingested ($0.30- 0.50/GB depending on commitment) plus per full-platform user ($49-99/month). This model eliminated the per-host pricing that made competitors expensive for large fleets, but it requires careful management of data ingest volume to keep costs predictable. Teams with high-cardinality metrics or verbose logging can see ingest costs climb unexpectedly.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓ Generous free tier with 100GB/month data ingest and full platform access — no feature gating like competitors
- ✓ Unified query language (NRQL) works across metrics, traces, logs, and events, enabling powerful cross-telemetry analysis
- ✓ Usage-based pricing eliminates per-host costs, making it more economical for large dynamic infrastructure
- ✓ CodeStream IDE integration brings production observability data directly into VS Code and JetBrains during development
- ✓ Over 500 integrations and pre-built quickstart dashboards accelerate time to value for common technology stacks
- ✓ Logs in context automatically correlates log entries with distributed traces, eliminating manual log searching
Cons
- ✗ Data ingest costs can be unpredictable — high-cardinality metrics and verbose logging drive up bills quickly
- ✗ The platform underwent a major rewrite (New Relic One) and some older documentation references the legacy UI, causing confusion
- ✗ Per-user pricing for full platform access ($49-99/user/month) adds up for larger engineering teams
- ✗ Alert configuration is powerful but complex — setting up meaningful alerts with NRQL conditions has a steeper learning curve than threshold-based systems
- ✗ Customer support response times have been inconsistent, particularly for non-enterprise tier customers
Key Features
Use Cases
Enterprise Application Performance Management
Large engineering organizations use New Relic APM to monitor hundreds of services across Java, .NET, and Node.js stacks. Distributed tracing identifies bottlenecks across service boundaries, and service maps visualize dependencies. SLI/SLO tracking provides objective measures of reliability.
Kubernetes and Cloud-Native Observability
Platform teams use New Relic's Kubernetes integration to monitor cluster health, pod resource utilization, and deployment rollouts. The cluster explorer provides visual troubleshooting, and Pixie integration enables eBPF-based observability without code changes for deep container visibility.
Frontend Performance Optimization
Web development teams use Browser monitoring to track Core Web Vitals across real user sessions. They identify JavaScript errors affecting conversion rates, slow AJAX calls degrading user experience, and third-party scripts adding page weight. Session traces help reproduce user-reported issues.
Full-Stack Incident Investigation
SRE teams use New Relic as their single source of truth during incidents. NRQL queries correlate infrastructure metrics with application traces and logs to identify root cause. Workloads group related entities so teams can assess the blast radius of an outage across all affected services and dependencies.
Integrations
Pricing
Free / Pay-as-you-go
New Relic offers a free plan. Paid plans unlock additional features and higher limits.
Best For
Frequently Asked Questions
How does New Relic's pricing compare to Datadog?
New Relic charges per GB of data ingested plus per user, while Datadog charges per host plus per product. For large fleets with many hosts, New Relic is often cheaper because there is no per-host cost. For teams with high data volumes but few hosts, Datadog may be more economical. New Relic's free tier (100GB/month, 1 user) is significantly more generous than Datadog's (5 hosts, 1-day retention). The right choice depends on your specific infrastructure size and data volume.
What is NRQL, and do I need to learn it?
NRQL (New Relic Query Language) is a SQL-like language for querying all your telemetry data. Basic queries look like 'SELECT average(duration) FROM Transaction WHERE appName = 'MyApp' SINCE 1 hour ago'. You can use the platform without NRQL through pre-built dashboards, but custom dashboards, advanced alerts, and deep analysis all require NRQL. If you know SQL, NRQL takes a few hours to learn. It is one of New Relic's strongest features once mastered.
Can I use New Relic for free in production?
Yes. The free tier includes 100GB of data ingest per month, one full-platform user, and unlimited basic users (who get read-only dashboard access). For a small application generating moderate telemetry, 100GB is sufficient for meaningful monitoring. Many startups and small teams run production monitoring on the free tier indefinitely. If you exceed 100GB, you only pay for the overage at standard rates.
How do I control New Relic data ingest costs?
Use drop rules to discard low-value data before it counts against your ingest. Configure sampling rates for distributed tracing (you rarely need 100% of traces). Set log forwarding filters to avoid sending debug-level logs in production. Use the Data Management hub to identify which sources consume the most ingest and optimize accordingly. Committed-use annual contracts offer lower per-GB rates than pay-as-you-go pricing.
Is New Relic suitable for small teams, or is it enterprise-only?
New Relic is suitable for teams of all sizes. The free tier is genuinely production-ready, and the usage-based model means small teams only pay for what they use. However, the platform is comprehensive and can feel overwhelming for teams that just need basic error tracking or uptime monitoring. If you only need error tracking, Sentry is simpler. If you only need uptime monitoring, a tool like Better Uptime is more focused. New Relic shines when you need multiple observability capabilities in one platform.
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