New Relic

Overview

New Relic is an observability platform designed to help organizations monitor, debug, and optimize their software systems. Established in 2008, the platform provides a unified view across applications, infrastructure, and user experiences by ingesting and correlating various forms of telemetry data, including metrics, events, logs, and traces New Relic 101 guide. This comprehensive approach allows development, operations, and SRE teams to identify performance bottlenecks, diagnose root causes of incidents, and understand the impact of code changes in real time.

The platform caters to a broad audience, from small development teams to large enterprises managing complex, distributed architectures. It is particularly suited for environments leveraging microservices, serverless functions, and cloud-native technologies, where traditional monitoring tools may struggle to provide adequate visibility. New Relic's core strength lies in its ability to consolidate data from diverse sources into a single pane of glass, enabling quicker problem resolution and improved system reliability.

New Relic shines in scenarios requiring deep application performance insights, real-time infrastructure health checks, and end-to-end transaction tracing. Its capabilities extend to monitoring user interactions through browser and mobile agents, simulating user journeys with synthetic monitoring, and managing logs centrally for analysis. The platform also supports custom instrumentation, allowing users to collect specific business metrics relevant to their operations. The New Relic Query Language (NRQL) provides a powerful interface for data exploration and custom dashboard creation, offering flexibility in how users interact with their telemetry data NRQL reference.

For organizations prioritizing compliance and data security, New Relic maintains certifications such as SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS New Relic Trust Center. Its consumption-based pricing model for data ingest, combined with user-tier pricing, offers scalability for varying team sizes and data volumes.

Key features

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Provides deep visibility into application health, transaction traces, error rates, and response times across various programming languages.
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Collects metrics from hosts, containers, and cloud services to track CPU, memory, network, and disk utilization.
• Log Management: Ingests, processes, and analyzes log data from all sources, enabling centralized troubleshooting and compliance auditing.
• Browser Monitoring: Tracks real user experience metrics, including page load times, JavaScript errors, and AJAX performance.
• Mobile Monitoring: Offers insights into mobile application performance, crash reporting, network requests, and user interactions.
• Synthetic Monitoring: Proactively tests application availability and performance from global locations using automated scripts.
• Error Tracking: Automatically detects, aggregates, and reports application errors, providing context for faster resolution.
• Serverless Monitoring: Monitors the performance and health of serverless functions and resources, such as AWS Lambda AWS Lambda monitoring.
• Distributed Tracing: Visualizes the full path of requests across microservices and distributed systems.
• Alerting and AI-powered Anomaly Detection: Configurable alerts based on thresholds and AI-driven detection of unusual patterns in data.

Pricing

New Relic utilizes a consumption-based pricing model for data ingest, complemented by per-user pricing for different platform access tiers. A free tier is available, offering 100 GB of data ingest per month, one full platform user, and unlimited basic users.

For detailed and up-to-date pricing information, refer to the New Relic pricing page.

Common integrations

• Cloud Providers: AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure via integrations for services like EC2, Lambda, EKS, GKE, Azure VMs, and Azure Functions Cloud integrations overview.
• Container Orchestration: Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift for monitoring containerized applications and infrastructure.
• Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, and many others through specific agents and integrations.
• Messaging Queues: Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS for monitoring message bus performance.
• CI/CD Tools: Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub Actions through webhooks and custom integrations to correlate deployment events with performance metrics.
• Alerting & Notification: PagerDuty, Slack, Opsgenie, VictorOps for incident management workflows.
• Serverless Platforms: AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions for monitoring function execution and cold starts.
• Web Servers: Nginx, Apache HTTP Server for performance and error monitoring.

Alternatives

• Datadog: Offers a similar breadth of monitoring capabilities, strong on infrastructure and log management, often noted for its user interface and broad integration ecosystem.
• Dynatrace: Known for its AI-powered causation engine and automated full-stack monitoring, providing deep insights into complex enterprise environments.
• Grafana Labs: Provides open-source and commercial solutions centered around Grafana for visualization, Loki for logs, and Prometheus for metrics, offering flexibility and control over data.

Getting started

To get started with New Relic, you typically install an agent in your application or infrastructure. Here's a basic example for a Node.js application, which involves installing the New Relic Node.js agent and configuring it:

# 1. Install the New Relic Node.js agent
npm install newrelic --save

// 2. Create a newrelic.js configuration file in your project root
//    Replace 'YOUR_LICENSE_KEY' with your actual New Relic license key
//    Replace 'YOUR_APP_NAME' with a descriptive name for your application

'use strict'

exports.config = {
  app_name: ['YOUR_APP_NAME'],
  license_key: 'YOUR_LICENSE_KEY',
  logging: {
    level: 'info'
  },
  allow_all_headers: true,
  attributes: {
    exclude: [
      'request.headers.cookie',
      'request.headers.authorization',
      'request.headers.proxyAuthorization',
      'request.headers.setCookie',
      'request.headers.xForwardedFor'
    ]
  }
}

// 3. Require the New Relic agent as the very first module in your application's entry file (e.g., app.js or server.js)

require('newrelic');

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const port = 3000;

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.send('Hello from New Relic monitored app!');
});

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`);
});

After these steps, start your application. The Node.js agent will automatically begin collecting performance data and sending it to your New Relic account. You can then log into the New Relic UI to view metrics, traces, and logs for your application. For more detailed instructions and other languages, consult the New Relic documentation.