Monitoring

New Relic

Full-stack observability platform with APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, browser monitoring, and error tracking under a single query engine.

★★★★☆8/10

apmobservabilitylogsdistributed-tracing

8/10

Verdict

Best for small teams wanting enterprise-grade APM and observability without paying per-host or per-seat fees.

Features9/10Ease of Use6/10Pricing8/10Documentation8/10

Use Cases

Monitor a web application with APM traces, error tracking, and infrastructure metrics in one place

Centralize logs from multiple services and query them with NRQL alongside application performance data

Set up distributed tracing across microservices to identify bottleneck requests

Free Tier

100GB/month data ingest, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users, 180-day data retention

How to Maximize the Free Tier

The free tier's 100GB/month is the most generous data ingest in observability — use it across APM, infra, and logs without splitting quotas. Start by instrumenting your most critical service with the APM agent, then add infrastructure monitoring for host metrics. Keep data volumes in check by setting up drop rules for noisy log patterns and sampling traces above a latency threshold. The single full platform user should be your primary on-call engineer; give everyone else basic (free) read-only access. Use New Relic's query language (NRQL) to build custom dashboards — it's more flexible than the UI widgets and doesn't count against your data budget.

Getting Started

Sign up at newrelic.com → install the language-specific APM agent for your stack (Node, Python, Go, etc.) → install the infrastructure agent on your hosts → enable log forwarding with the Log API or agent integration → explore your data in the New Relic One UI → build dashboards with NRQL queries → set up alerts with notification channels.

Pros

Free tier generosity: 100GB/month ingest and 180-day retention are unmatched — comparable to Datadog's paid tier
Unified query: NRQL lets you query APM, infra, logs, and browser data in one language without switching tools
Full platform access: One user gets complete access to all features including APM, distributed tracing, and error analytics

Cons

Learning curve: NRQL and the New Relic One interface are powerful but have a steeper learning curve than simpler tools
Agent overhead: APM agents add latency and memory overhead to your application — can be 5-15% on small instances
Seat limits: Only 1 full platform user on free tier — larger teams need the paid plan at $49/full user/month

Alternatives

Grafana Cloud8/10★★★★☆Sentry8/10★★★★☆

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