In today’s digital-first world, businesses and organizations are constantly looking for ways to ensure their applications and infrastructure perform at their best. Slow load times, service disruptions, or unexpected downtime can lead to poor customer experiences, lost revenue, and brand damage. This is where monitoring and observability tools like New Relic come in.

New Relic provides a comprehensive platform that allows you to monitor, manage, and optimize the performance of your entire tech stack. From real-time application performance monitoring (APM) to infrastructure management, it offers insights into everything from your backend servers to user interactions. In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into what New Relic is, its core features, pricing options, and why it’s an essential tool for developers, DevOps teams, and enterprises alike.

What Is New Relic?

New Relic group buy is a cloud-based observability platform designed to provide real-time insights into the performance of your applications, infrastructure, and the end-user experience. It allows you to monitor your entire stack, from front-end to back-end, and everything in between, giving you a complete view of how your systems are performing.

Originally, New Relic was primarily focused on Application Performance Monitoring (APM), allowing developers and IT teams to understand how well their applications were running and where bottlenecks or issues might arise. Over the years, New Relic has expanded its offerings to include:

• Infrastructure monitoring to track server performance, containers, and cloud environments.

• Log management for centralized logging and event management.

• Synthetics monitoring to simulate user interactions and test application availability globally.

• Real User Monitoring (RUM) to capture the performance metrics of actual users interacting with your application.

• Distributed tracing to understand the entire lifecycle of user transactions and pinpoint areas where performance can be improved.

New Relic allows businesses to proactively manage their IT infrastructure and applications, enabling them to quickly identify and address performance issues before they impact users. Its focus on real-time monitoring and AI-driven insights helps ensure that any potential problems are flagged early, allowing teams to take swift action to resolve them.

Pricing Plans

New Relic offers transparent and scalable pricing to accommodate various organizational needs:

• Free:

  • 100 GB data ingest

  • One free full platform user

  • Unlimited basic and core users

  • Access to 30+ capabilities

  • Data retention

• Standard:

  • $49 per core user

  • Limited to 5 full platform users

  • Ticketed support with 2 business days response SLA

  • SAML single sign-on

• Pro:

  • $349 per full platform user (annual commitment)

  • No maximum on full platform users

  • 2-hour critical initial support response SLA

  • Data Plus eligibility

• Enterprise:

  • Custom pricing

  • Includes all Pro features

  • Advanced security and compliance options

  • Priority ticket routing with 1-hour critical initial support response SLA

Note: Prices are based on annual commitments and may vary. For detailed pricing, visit New Relic’s official pricing page 

Pros & Cons

Why New Relic Is Essential For ?

New Relic is an essential tool for a variety of professionals and organizations who need to maintain performance, ensure system reliability, and deliver exceptional user experiences. Here’s a breakdown of why New Relic is so crucial for different groups:

1. Developers

Developers are constantly tasked with writing code, deploying features, and maintaining the overall functionality of applications. For them, New Relic is an essential tool because it provides:

• Real-time insights into application performance: New Relic allows developers to identify performance bottlenecks, optimize code, and make data-driven decisions to improve user experience.

• Deep diagnostics: The platform offers detailed performance metrics, including response times, error rates, and throughput. This allows developers to pinpoint issues down to individual lines of code, improving debugging efficiency.

• User-centric data: Through Real User Monitoring (RUM), developers can see how actual users interact with their applications, identifying areas where improvements are needed.

• AI-driven alerts and anomaly detection: New Relic can automatically detect performance anomalies and send alerts, ensuring developers can act quickly when issues arise.

2. DevOps Teams

DevOps teams are responsible for automating and monitoring the deployment, operation, and scaling of applications. New Relic is essential for DevOps professionals because it offers:

• Unified monitoring across infrastructure and applications: New Relic integrates seamlessly with servers, containers, cloud services, and applications, giving DevOps teams a complete view of system health.

• Performance at scale: With New Relic, DevOps teams can monitor the performance of large-scale, distributed systems, which is crucial for modern cloud-based applications.

• Efficiency in root-cause analysis: Instead of manually sifting through logs or waiting for user complaints, DevOps teams can use New Relic’s performance data to quickly diagnose problems and resolve issues before they escalate.

• Automated monitoring and alerts: DevOps teams can set up automated alerts for system anomalies or performance degradation, ensuring timely responses.

3. Product Managers & Teams

Product managers and product teams often need to make decisions based on how well users are interacting with their product. New Relic is beneficial for them because it provides:

• User experience insights: New Relic’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Monitoring allow product teams to track how users interact with features, identify pain points, and improve user journeys.

• Feature performance metrics: Product managers can see how specific features are performing, which helps in prioritizing optimizations or new feature releases.

• User-centric performance data: Understanding where users experience slowdowns or failures allows product teams to make informed decisions on what to prioritize next.

4. Enterprises & IT Operations Teams

For large enterprises, New Relic is crucial in maintaining operational excellence across complex systems and ensuring compliance. Here’s why it’s essential for enterprise IT teams:

• Cross-functional observability: Enterprises typically operate a diverse tech stack with numerous services, platforms, and teams. New Relic provides centralized monitoring across all these components, allowing IT teams to track the performance of entire systems in real-time.

• Compliance and security monitoring: Enterprises often need to meet strict regulatory and security standards. New Relic helps monitor infrastructure for potential security vulnerabilities and provides audit trails for compliance reporting.

• Scalability: New Relic is designed to scale with the enterprise, ensuring it can monitor thousands of services, containers, or microservices without missing a beat.

• Cost optimization: By monitoring the performance of infrastructure and applications, New Relic helps identify inefficiencies that can be addressed to reduce operational costs.

5. Support & Customer Success Teams

Customer-facing teams, such as support and customer success, can greatly benefit from New Relic’s real-time insights. They can:

• Proactively identify issues: Instead of waiting for customers to report issues, support teams can use New Relic’s data to detect system slowdowns, downtime, or other performance problems that may affect users.

• Monitor end-user experience: With RUM and synthetic monitoring, customer-facing teams can track issues reported by users and quickly correlate them with system performance metrics.

• Improve service delivery: By gaining insights into system performance, customer success teams can offer more informed advice and proactive solutions to clients, improving customer satisfaction.

Who Will Benefit the Most?

While New Relic is a versatile tool that can benefit a wide range of users, the following groups will find it most valuable:

1. Growing Tech Teams and Startups

For smaller teams or startups with limited resources, New Relic’s free tier makes it easy to get started without the burden of upfront costs. As your team grows, New Relic scales with you, offering more advanced features and integrations. This makes it a great tool for startups that need to ensure their product performs well from day one.

2. Medium to Large Enterprises

As companies expand, their infrastructure and application environments grow increasingly complex. New Relic is perfect for medium to large enterprises that need an enterprise-grade solution capable of handling extensive systems, thousands of users, and distributed applications.

• Global Reach: Enterprises with a global user base can use New Relic’s synthetic and real user monitoring to ensure performance across different regions.

• Data-Driven Decisions: Decision-makers in larger companies rely on the data New Relic provides to optimize both IT and business operations.

3. Cloud-Native Organizations

Organizations that leverage cloud-native technologies, such as microservices, containers, and serverless architectures, will benefit significantly from New Relic’s real-time monitoring across cloud environments (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.). New Relic seamlessly integrates with cloud platforms and allows teams to monitor dynamic infrastructure, enabling fast troubleshooting and performance optimization.

4. E-commerce and SaaS Companies

For companies in the e-commerce or SaaS space, where uptime and speed directly impact revenue and customer satisfaction, New Relic ensures that applications run smoothly, services stay available, and users have the best possible experience. The ability to continuously monitor and optimize user experience is key to keeping customers happy and minimizing downtime.

5. Digital Transformation Teams

For organizations undergoing digital transformation, New Relic provides a comprehensive monitoring solution that covers both legacy systems and modern digital applications. It enables these teams to measure the effectiveness of new systems, ensuring smooth transitions from old to new technologies.

Key Features of New Relic

New Relic is packed with powerful features that provide in-depth monitoring and observability across your entire stack. Below are some of the most essential features that make New Relic a leading tool for performance monitoring:

1. Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

• Real-Time Monitoring: New Relic’s APM allows you to monitor the performance of your applications in real time, including detailed data about response times, error rates, and throughput.

• Code-Level Diagnostics: It provides deep insights into application-level performance, including identifying bottlenecks and slow queries, and understanding how individual lines of code impact performance.

• Transaction Tracing: New Relic tracks the full lifecycle of a transaction, helping developers identify slowdowns at every stage from front-end to back-end services.

• Error Analysis: Automatically collects error data and helps developers quickly pinpoint the root cause of performance issues to reduce troubleshooting time.

2. Infrastructure Monitoring

• Server and Cloud Monitoring: New Relic allows you to monitor the health and performance of servers, virtual machines, containers, and cloud environments (such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure).

• Real-Time Metrics: Infrastructure monitoring helps you track key metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, disk performance, and network activity, allowing teams to spot issues before they impact users.

• Auto-Scaling Insights: If you’re running applications on cloud platforms with auto-scaling enabled, New Relic can provide insights into the scaling activity, helping you maintain optimal resource allocation.

3. Log Management

• Centralized Log Aggregation: New Relic can aggregate logs from various sources (servers, containers, cloud platforms), making it easier to monitor and troubleshoot issues in your application.

• Powerful Search and Filtering: The platform allows users to search and filter logs using advanced queries to locate issues quickly and resolve them faster.

• Log-based Alerts: You can set up alerts based on specific log entries, ensuring that you are notified when critical issues arise.

4. Real User Monitoring (RUM)

• End-User Experience Monitoring: With Real User Monitoring, New Relic tracks how real users interact with your application in real time. This helps identify slowdowns and errors from the user’s perspective.

• Session-Level Details: RUM provides granular data on user sessions, including page load times, user clicks, and interactions. This helps you optimize the user journey.

• Geolocation Analytics: You can see how users from different geographical locations experience your application, helping to optimize performance in specific regions.

5. Synthetic Monitoring

• Simulated User Interactions: Synthetic Monitoring lets you simulate user interactions with your website or application from various global locations. This ensures your app is performing well from a user’s perspective, even when they aren’t actively interacting with it.

• Availability Monitoring: Synthetic tests allow you to check the availability of your website or application 24/7, ensuring uptime and performance.

• End-to-End Testing: You can set up automated synthetic scripts to test key workflows, identify performance issues, and monitor the overall health of your application.

6. Distributed Tracing

• Trace User Transactions Across Services: Distributed tracing allows you to trace the full path of a user request as it travels through various microservices, databases, and other backend systems.

• Root Cause Analysis: By visualizing the entire request flow, New Relic makes it easy to identify where performance bottlenecks or failures occur, so you can quickly fix issues in complex, distributed systems.

• Service Dependency Mapping: Distributed tracing also helps you visualize the dependencies between your services, making it easier to understand how one service’s failure can affect others.

7. Alerting and Anomaly Detection

• Custom Alerts: New Relic allows you to create custom alerting rules based on your application’s specific needs. You can be notified about critical performance issues, such as high error rates or slow response times.

• AI-Powered Alerts: New Relic’s AI-driven anomaly detection automatically identifies unusual performance patterns and alerts you to potential issues before they impact users.

• Notification Channels: You can integrate New Relic with various messaging services such as Slack, email, or webhooks to ensure that the right teams are alerted to critical incidents in real time.

8. Dashboards and Insights

• Customizable Dashboards: New Relic allows you to create custom dashboards that display performance metrics and key data points relevant to your team or business. These dashboards offer real-time data visualizations, so teams can make informed decisions.

• Pre-Built Dashboards: New Relic offers a collection of pre-built dashboards to get you started quickly, covering common use cases like APM monitoring, infrastructure health, and error tracking.

• Business Insights: Beyond technical monitoring, New Relic also provides high-level insights that can help business leaders understand performance trends, identify opportunities for improvement, and align technical goals with business objectives.

9. Mobile Monitoring

• Mobile Application Monitoring: New Relic provides mobile application performance monitoring for iOS and Android apps. You can track crash rates, performance bottlenecks, and user experience metrics for mobile applications.

• Real-Time Analytics for Mobile: You can monitor key mobile metrics such as load time, network requests, and user interactions, ensuring your mobile apps are running smoothly for users.

How to Use New Relic?

Using New Relic involves setting up and configuring its various features to monitor your applications, infrastructure, and user interactions. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get started:

Step 1: Create a New Relic Account

• Sign up for a New Relic account on their website. You can start with the free tier, which offers basic monitoring features for up to 100GB of data ingestion per month.

• Once you’ve signed up, log in to your New Relic account and proceed to the next step.

Step 2: Install New Relic Agents

• Application Agents: New Relic uses agents to collect data from your application. Depending on the technology stack you’re using (Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby, etc.), you’ll need to install the corresponding agent.

  • For example, for a Node.js application, you would run npm install newrelic and configure the newrelic.js file to enable monitoring.

• Infrastructure Monitoring: If you want to monitor servers or cloud infrastructure, you can install the New Relic infrastructure agent. It collects data about your server performance, CPU, memory, and disk usage.

Step 3: Configure Your Application

• After installing the agent, configure your application to send data to New Relic. This typically involves adding a New Relic license key and configuration details to your application’s settings.

• For web applications, you may need to add New Relic’s JavaScript agent to your site to enable Real User Monitoring (RUM).

Step 4: Set Up Dashboards

• Once New Relic begins collecting data, you can create custom dashboards to visualize your application’s key performance metrics, infrastructure health, and other relevant data.

• You can use New Relic’s pre-built templates or create fully customized dashboards using their drag-and-drop interface.

Step 5: Set Alerts and Notifications

• Set up alert policies based on the metrics you care about. For example, you may want to be alerted if application response times exceed a certain threshold, or if error rates spike.

• Configure notification channels to receive alerts via Slack, email, or other services.

Step 6: Monitor and Analyze Data

• After setting everything up, you can start monitoring your applications, infrastructure, and user interactions. Use New Relic’s various tools—such as APM, infrastructure monitoring, log aggregation, and RUM—to get real-time insights.

• Leverage New Relic’s AI-powered anomaly detection to automatically identify performance issues and understand what’s happening across your entire stack.

Step 7: Refine and Optimize

• Over time, use the insights from New Relic to optimize performance, improve system reliability, and enhance the user experience. You can continuously tweak your configurations, adjust alerting rules, and improve the data visualizations to meet your changing needs.

By following these steps, you can easily set up New Relic and start benefiting from its powerful observability features, ensuring that your applications and infrastructure are running smoothly.

Who Should Use New Relic ?

New Relic is a versatile observability platform that can benefit a wide range of users across various industries. Its powerful features are designed to help different roles within an organization monitor, diagnose, and optimize performance across the tech stack. Here’s a breakdown of who should use New Relic:

1. Developers and Engineering Teams

Developers are among the primary users of New Relic. The platform provides them with detailed insights into the performance of their applications, which helps identify performance bottlenecks, slow queries, and other issues at the code level. Developers who work with large, complex systems or microservices can use New Relic to:

• Track real-time application performance and ensure that code is optimized for speed and efficiency.

• Diagnose performance issues at the code level with transaction tracing and error analysis, allowing them to quickly address bugs and reduce downtime.

• Integrate New Relic into their CI/CD pipeline to monitor app health during deployments, ensuring new changes don’t negatively impact performance.

2. DevOps and IT Operations Teams

DevOps teams responsible for deploying and managing infrastructure will benefit from New Relic’s infrastructure monitoring and scalability features. New Relic helps these teams:

• Monitor the health of servers, containers, and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), ensuring that infrastructure is running optimally.

• Manage and monitor large-scale distributed systems and ensure that microservices, databases, and backend systems are all working in harmony.

• Implement proactive monitoring to avoid downtime by detecting issues before they impact customers.

3. Product Managers and UX/UI Teams

Product managers and user experience teams will find New Relic’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring extremely valuable. These features allow them to:

• Track user behavior and experience to identify areas where users may face slowdowns or other issues during their interactions with the app or website.

• Measure the performance of features and assess which ones are performing well and which need improvement based on real user data.

• Improve customer satisfaction by continuously optimizing the user journey based on the performance data provided by New Relic.

4. Enterprises and Large Organizations

Large enterprises that operate at scale and have complex, distributed environments will benefit significantly from New Relic’s ability to monitor applications, infrastructure, and cloud services in one unified platform. For these organizations, New Relic:

• Provides visibility across all components of the system, helping IT teams and management understand how everything is performing from a holistic perspective.

• Scales to support massive infrastructure and large amounts of real-time data, making it suitable for global enterprises with multiple services and regions.

• Facilitates cross-team collaboration by providing centralized performance data that can be accessed and used by developers, product managers, and IT operations.

5. E-commerce and SaaS Companies

For e-commerce websites and SaaS businesses, New Relic is crucial in maintaining optimal performance, uptime, and user experience. These industries rely heavily on their online platforms, where even minor slowdowns can result in lost revenue and a poor customer experience. New Relic helps by:

• Ensuring high availability and performance for e-commerce sites, which directly impacts revenue.

• Monitoring user interactions and performance metrics for SaaS applications to ensure customers have a seamless experience, which leads to improved customer retention.

• Scaling infrastructure efficiently to handle traffic spikes, such as during sales or marketing events, and ensuring that resources are optimized to meet demand.

6. Startups and Growing Teams

New Relic is also ideal for startups and small teams that need to scale quickly. The platform allows these businesses to start small with the free tier and grow as their monitoring needs evolve. New Relic helps startups by:

• Providing an easy-to-use, cost-effective monitoring solution that doesn’t require large teams or complex infrastructure.

• Helping startups proactively manage performance from the beginning to avoid potential scalability issues as they grow.

• Ensuring that performance and customer experience are prioritized early on, making it easier to deliver high-quality products and retain users.

7. Customer Support and Success Teams

Customer-facing teams, such as support and customer success, can use New Relic to:

• Get real-time data about application performance to respond to customer complaints quickly and efficiently.

• Proactively monitor for issues and anticipate customer concerns before they escalate by using New Relic’s alerts and synthetic monitoring to detect problems.

• Improve service delivery by leveraging performance data to understand customer needs and tailor support interactions.

Should You Buy New Relic?

Whether or not you should purchase New Relic depends on your specific business needs, the size of your team, and your monitoring requirements. Here’s a breakdown to help you decide if investing in New Relic is right for you:

Reasons to Buy New Relic

1. You Need a Comprehensive Monitoring Solution
   If you’re looking for a unified platform that can provide insights into every aspect of your application, from frontend performance to backend infrastructure, New Relic is an excellent choice. Its all-in-one solution combines APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management, and user experience monitoring in a single platform.

2. Your Team Is Scaling
   As your application grows, performance issues can become harder to manage. New Relic is designed to scale with your needs, allowing you to monitor everything from small systems to large, distributed architectures. If you expect to grow and need robust monitoring to support that growth, investing in New Relic makes sense.

3. You Want Proactive Performance Monitoring
   With New Relic, you don’t just react to issues after they’ve occurred— you proactively monitor your infrastructure and applications. New Relic’s AI-powered anomaly detection, alerts, and real-time diagnostics help identify problems before they escalate into larger issues that affect users.

4. You Need Detailed Insights for Optimization
   If performance optimization is critical to your business (e.g., improving application speed, reducing downtime, or enhancing the user experience), New Relic offers detailed, real-time insights that can guide your decision-making and enable quick fixes. With tools like distributed tracing, transaction analytics, and real-time dashboards, you can fine-tune every aspect of your application’s performance.

5. Your Business Relies on High Availability
   For businesses with high availability requirements—such as e-commerce websites or SaaS platforms—New Relic helps ensure that everything is running smoothly 24/7. Its monitoring features allow you to anticipate and respond to issues before they impact customers, making it crucial for maintaining uptime and performance.

6. You Have a Complex, Distributed Environment
   If you’re operating in a microservices architecture or dealing with cloud environments, New Relic provides visibility across all your components. Its distributed tracing and service mapping features allow you to track requests as they move through various services, making it ideal for complex, distributed systems.

7. You Need Strong Integrations
   New Relic integrates with a variety of other tools and services, from cloud platforms like AWS and Azure to DevOps tools like Jenkins and Kubernetes. If your team relies on a range of tools to manage infrastructure and deployment, New Relic’s robust integrations make it easier to centralize monitoring.

Reasons to Consider Alternatives

1. You Have a Limited Budget
   While New Relic offers a free tier, its premium plans can get expensive, especially for larger organizations or businesses with high data volumes. If you have a tight budget and only need basic monitoring capabilities, you may want to explore alternative tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana that may offer lower-cost solutions or free tiers with essential features.

2. You Have Specific Monitoring Needs
   If your organization has very specific requirements, such as monitoring a particular type of infrastructure or application, you might find that other monitoring platforms are more tailored to your needs. For example, if you focus heavily on cloud-native environments, you might prefer a tool like Dynatrace or Datadog that provides more specialized features for cloud monitoring.

3. You Only Need Basic Monitoring
   If you’re a small business or team that only needs simple monitoring without the complexity of New Relic’s extensive feature set, you might not need to purchase New Relic. In this case, simpler tools or open-source options might be sufficient.

How to Buy New Relic at a Cheap Price of $3.99 ?

Purchasing New Relic at a discounted price through Toolsurf is simple and cost-effective. Here’s how you can get started:

Step-by-Step Guide to Purchase New Relic at $3.99:

1. Visit the Toolsurf Shop:
   Navigate to the Toolsurf shop at https://www.toolsurf.com/shop.

2. Browse New Relic Products:
   Explore the range of New Relic products and services available at a discounted price. You can search for New Relic or filter the selection to find the specific New Relic plan or service you’re looking for.

3. Select Your Desired New Relic Plan:
   Once you find the New Relic plan or service you need, click on it for more details. You’ll find all the essential information regarding features and pricing.

4. Add to Cart:
   When you’re ready, click the “Add to Cart” button to include the selected New Relic service in your shopping cart.

5. Proceed to Checkout:
   After selecting your items, click on the cart icon and choose “Proceed to Checkout.”

6. Create an Account or Log In:
   If you’re a new user, you’ll need to create an account by providing your email address and setting a password. If you’re an existing user, simply log in with your credentials.

7. Complete the Purchase:
   Follow the on-screen instructions to finalize your purchase. Toolsurf offers various payment methods for your convenience, ensuring a smooth checkout process.

8. Access Your New Relic Service:
   Once your payment is confirmed, you will get instant access to your New Relic account and can start monitoring your applications and infrastructure right away.

Why Choose Toolsurf for New Relic?

Toolsurf is an excellent platform for purchasing New Relic services at an unbeatable price of just $3.99. Here are some compelling reasons to choose Toolsurf:

1. Affordable Pricing:

Toolsurf offers New Relic at a fraction of its original cost, with prices starting as low as $3.99. This is perfect for businesses and individuals looking to get started with application performance monitoring without a hefty investment.

2. Instant Access:

After your purchase, you’ll receive immediate access to New Relic’s services. You can start benefiting from performance monitoring tools right away, ensuring that your systems are always optimized.

3. Comprehensive Features:

Toolsurf offers a wide range of New Relic plans with access to a variety of features, including Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Infrastructure Monitoring, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and more.

4. User-Friendly Experience:

Toolsurf’s website is designed with simplicity in mind, making the process of finding and purchasing New Relic products seamless. The intuitive layout ensures you can easily browse through options and make a purchase in just a few clicks.

5. Secure Transactions:

Toolsurf provides a secure payment process, protecting your financial information throughout the transaction. You can rest assured that your details are kept private and safe.

6. Regular Updates:

Toolsurf ensures that the New Relic products available are always up to date. You’ll get the latest features, security patches, and performance improvements as part of your purchase.

7. Excellent Customer Support:

Toolsurf offers customer support to assist you in case you encounter any issues during your purchase or setup of New Relic. Their team is available to help you get the most out of your purchase.

New Relic Alternatives

While New Relic is a popular choice for application performance monitoring (APM), there are several alternatives available that provide similar functionalities, often with their unique features and pricing models. Below are some of the top New Relic alternatives, each catering to different monitoring needs and business requirements.

1. Datadog

Overview:
Datadog is a powerful cloud-based monitoring and observability platform that focuses on providing real-time visibility across your entire stack, including applications, infrastructure, and logs. It’s often considered a direct competitor to New Relic with its focus on cloud-scale applications and microservices.

Key Features:

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

• Infrastructure monitoring

• Log management and analysis

• Real-time monitoring of cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)

• Integration with over 400+ services and tools

Best for:
Teams needing comprehensive visibility into their entire application stack, particularly in complex cloud-native and microservices environments.

Pricing:
Pricing is based on the number of hosts and services you monitor, which makes it scalable for growing businesses.

2. Dynatrace

Overview:
Dynatrace is another leading APM tool that provides automatic discovery and full-stack monitoring. It offers advanced AI-powered insights for troubleshooting and performance optimization, making it ideal for enterprises that need deep application performance visibility.

Key Features:

• Automatic root cause analysis with AI

• Full-stack observability, including APM, infrastructure, and logs

• Distributed tracing and real-time metrics

• Cloud-native and hybrid environment monitoring

• Integration with DevOps tools and CI/CD pipelines

Best for:
Large enterprises that require deep insights into complex applications, particularly in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Pricing:
Pricing is tailored based on the features, number of hosts, and the complexity of the environment. Generally, it’s a more premium option than others.

3. AppDynamics

Overview:
Acquired by Cisco, AppDynamics is an enterprise-grade APM platform that focuses on monitoring the performance of applications, databases, and user transactions. It provides end-to-end visibility into application performance and the impact on user experience.

Key Features:

• Real-time application monitoring

• End-to-end user experience monitoring

• Business transaction monitoring

• Infrastructure and cloud monitoring

• AI-driven insights and automatic anomaly detection

Best for:
Large enterprises and businesses with complex, mission-critical applications that require high levels of performance monitoring.

Pricing:
AppDynamics’ pricing is based on the number of agents (for applications and infrastructure) and the specific features needed. It tends to be more expensive for small businesses.

4. Prometheus & Grafana

Overview:
Prometheus and Grafana are open-source tools that are commonly used together for monitoring and visualizing metrics. Prometheus focuses on gathering time-series data, while Grafana excels at providing a highly customizable visualization layer.

Key Features:

• Open-source and free to use

• Powerful time-series data collection with Prometheus

• Customizable dashboards with Grafana

• Alerting and visualization capabilities

• Large community and plenty of integrations

Best for:
Small to medium-sized businesses or teams that need a low-cost, highly customizable solution, and are comfortable setting up and managing their monitoring infrastructure.

Pricing:
Free for open-source use, though managed hosting options are available for Grafana and Prometheus for a fee.

5. Sentry

Overview:
Sentry focuses primarily on error tracking and performance monitoring. While it’s not as feature-rich as New Relic for full-stack observability, it offers a lightweight and easy-to-use solution for tracking application errors and performance bottlenecks.

Key Features:

• Real-time error tracking and monitoring

• Performance monitoring with distributed tracing

• Integration with a wide range of frameworks and platforms

• Simple setup and low overhead

• Focused on identifying and diagnosing errors rather than full-stack monitoring

Best for:
Teams or developers who need an error monitoring solution with some basic performance tracking, ideal for smaller applications or teams.

Pricing:
Sentry offers a free plan with limited features and paid plans based on events processed per month.

6. Elastic APM

Overview:
Elastic APM is part of the Elastic Stack (which includes Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash), and it provides application performance monitoring combined with log aggregation and search capabilities. Elastic APM is well-suited for teams already using the Elastic Stack for other purposes.

Key Features:

• Distributed tracing and APM

• Integration with Elasticsearch for logs and metrics

• Customizable dashboards via Kibana

• Real-time monitoring and anomaly detection

• Open-source option with paid Enterprise features

Best for:
Teams already using the Elastic Stack or those who need a unified solution for logs, metrics, and APM.

Pricing:
Elastic APM offers a free open-source version with additional paid features and support available through Elastic’s subscription plans.

7. Raygun

Overview:
Raygun is an error and performance monitoring tool that provides real-time insights into application health, user experience, and performance issues. It’s known for its simple setup and user-friendly interface.

Key Features:

• Error and crash reporting

• Real-time performance monitoring

• Detailed diagnostics with stack traces

• Integration with multiple platforms and frameworks

• Insights into user impact and performance bottlenecks

Best for:
Development teams that need an intuitive tool for tracking errors and monitoring application performance.

Pricing:
Raygun offers both free and paid plans based on features, events, and the number of users monitored.

8. Zabbix

Overview:
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring platform designed to track the performance of applications, servers, and networks. It can monitor servers, virtual machines, and cloud services, making it a good choice for organizations with complex infrastructure.

Key Features:

• Open-source and free to use

• Multi-layered monitoring (infrastructure, applications, network)

• Customizable alerts and notifications

• Supports cloud, hybrid, and on-premise monitoring

• Integrates with other tools for enhanced monitoring

Best for:
IT operations teams that need a versatile, open-source monitoring tool to monitor infrastructure, servers, and applications at scale.

Pricing:
Free for the open-source version. Paid options are available for enterprise-level support and features.

FAQs

1. What is New Relic used for?

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that offers application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), and log management. It helps businesses monitor and optimize the performance of their applications and infrastructure in real-time.

2. How much does New Relic cost?

New Relic offers several pricing plans based on usage, ranging from a free plan with limited features to paid plans that scale with your needs. The cost varies depending on the size of your infrastructure, the number of hosts, and the features you require.

3. Is New Relic suitable for small businesses?

Yes, New Relic is suitable for small businesses, especially those running web or mobile applications. The free tier of New Relic provides basic monitoring tools that can help small teams get started. For larger teams, New Relic’s paid plans offer more advanced features.

4. Can New Relic monitor cloud-native applications?

Yes, New Relic is designed to monitor cloud-native applications, including those running on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It provides deep insights into microservices, containerized environments, and serverless applications.

5. Is New Relic compatible with popular programming languages?

Yes, New Relic supports a wide range of programming languages, including Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Go, among others.

User Reviews and Ratings

New Relic is generally well-received, with many users praising its ability to monitor application performance in real-time and provide detailed insights into user behavior and system health.

Positive Reviews:

• Real-Time Insights: Many users appreciate the real-time performance metrics and the ability to track system health continuously.

• Ease of Use: Users often highlight the intuitive interface that makes it easy for both technical and non-technical users to navigate.

• Scalability: Businesses with growing infrastructure find New Relic’s scalability to be one of its strongest points, allowing them to monitor large, complex systems without performance lag.

Negative Reviews:

• Pricing Concerns: A common downside reported is the pricing structure. Some users feel that the higher-tier plans can be costly, especially for smaller businesses or startups.

• Complex Setup: While many find New Relic easy to use, others report that the setup process can be complex for beginners, particularly when configuring advanced features.

Average Rating:

New Relic typically holds high ratings (4.5/5 stars) on review platforms like G2 and TrustRadius due to its comprehensive features and performance monitoring capabilities. However, some users note the steep learning curve and pricing as drawbacks.

Is New Relic Worth It?

Pros:

• Comprehensive Monitoring: New Relic offers a full-stack observability platform, making it suitable for businesses that need deep insights into their applications and infrastructure.

• Scalability: Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, New Relic scales with your needs, providing a flexible solution for any size operation.

• Robust Integrations: New Relic integrates with a wide array of third-party services, allowing for seamless monitoring of various systems and tools.

Cons:

• Cost: The paid plans can get expensive, particularly for larger teams or those with extensive infrastructure needs.

• Complexity: While powerful, New Relic can be complex to configure and use for those without a deep technical background.

Conclusion:

New Relic is definitely worth considering if you need a comprehensive monitoring and observability tool for your application and infrastructure. It’s ideal for businesses that require detailed, real-time data to ensure optimal performance. However, if you’re a small business or startup with a limited budget, you might want to explore more affordable options before committing to New Relic.

Final Thoughts