New Relic

Overview

New Relic provides a unified observability platform designed to help organizations monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their software applications and infrastructure. Founded in 2008, the platform integrates various telemetry data types, including metrics, events, logs, and traces, into a single interface. This consolidated view assists developers, operations teams, and SREs in understanding the performance and health of complex distributed systems across the entire software stack.

The platform's core offerings include Application Performance Monitoring (APM), which tracks application response times, throughput, and error rates for various programming languages such as Java, Python, and Node.js. Infrastructure Monitoring extends this capability to servers, containers, and cloud services, providing insights into CPU utilization, memory consumption, and network activity. Log Management allows for the aggregation, search, and analysis of log data from diverse sources, facilitating faster root cause analysis.

New Relic is suitable for organizations ranging from small development teams to large enterprises managing complex microservices architectures and cloud-native applications. It is particularly effective for teams that require detailed transaction tracing, real-time dashboards, and alert mechanisms to proactively address performance issues. The platform's synthetic monitoring capabilities allow users to simulate user interactions and API calls to detect problems before they impact end-users, while browser and mobile monitoring provide visibility into client-side performance. For example, monitoring a Java application's performance on New Relic involves deploying an agent that collects data on methods, database calls, and external service requests, providing a detailed breakdown of transaction traces within the application.

The platform emphasizes a data-driven approach to operations, enabling teams to correlate data from different sources to identify patterns and anomalies. This is crucial for modern applications that often span multiple services, containers, and cloud providers. For instance, if a web application experiences slow load times, New Relic can help pinpoint whether the bottleneck is in the front-end JavaScript, a specific backend API call, or an underlying database query. Its comprehensive suite of tools aims to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and improve overall system reliability. Industry analysts like Gartner recognize observability platforms as critical for managing modern IT environments, emphasizing their role in providing a unified view of system performance and user experience in distributed systems.

Key features

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Monitors application health, response times, throughput, and error rates across various programming languages. Includes distributed tracing for transaction visibility.
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Provides visibility into the performance of hosts, containers, and cloud services, including CPU, memory, and network metrics.
• Log Management: Aggregates, indexes, and analyzes log data from all sources, enabling correlation with other telemetry data for faster troubleshooting.
• Browser Monitoring: Tracks real user experience (RUM) metrics such as page load times, JavaScript errors, and AJAX request performance.
• Mobile Monitoring: Monitors mobile application performance, crashes, network requests, and user interactions for iOS and Android apps.
• Synthetics Monitoring: Proactively checks application availability and performance from various global locations using simulated user journeys and API checks.
• Security (New Relic Vulnerability Management): Detects and prioritizes software vulnerabilities within applications and infrastructure.
• Custom Dashboards and Alerting: Allows users to build custom visualizations and configure alerts based on any collected telemetry data.

Pricing

New Relic offers a tiered pricing model that includes a free tier and usage-based options for paid plans. Pricing is primarily determined by data ingestion volume and the type of users on the platform.

Additional costs apply for data ingested beyond the free tier, and for different user types (Basic, Core, Full Platform), each with varying levels of access and capabilities as detailed on their pricing page. Pricing is effective as of May 2026.

Common integrations

• Cloud Platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure (cloud integrations documentation)
• Container Orchestration: Kubernetes, Docker (Kubernetes integration guide)
• Monitoring & Alerting: PagerDuty, Slack, Opsgenie, VictorOps (notification channels documentation)
• CI/CD Tools: Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub Actions (CI/CD integration examples)
• Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis (database integrations list)
• Serverless: AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions (AWS Lambda monitoring)

Alternatives

• Datadog: Offers a similar suite of monitoring and observability tools, with a strong focus on infrastructure and log management, often highlighted for its extensive integration ecosystem.
• Dynatrace: Provides AI-powered full-stack observability with automated root cause analysis and user experience monitoring.
• Splunk: Specializes in security information and event management (SIEM) and log management, with capabilities extended to observability through Splunk Observability Cloud.
• Prometheus: An open-source monitoring system with a dimensional data model and flexible query language, often combined with Grafana for visualization.
• AppDynamics: Focuses on application performance monitoring and business transaction tracing, particularly for complex enterprise environments.

Getting started

To get started with New Relic APM for a Java application, you typically download and configure the Java agent. The following steps outline a basic setup:

1. Download the Java agent: Obtain the newrelic.jar file and newrelic.yml configuration file from New Relic.
2. Place the agent: Put these files in a directory accessible by your application server.
3. Configure the agent: Edit newrelic.yml to set your application name and license key.
4. Attach the agent: Add the -javaagent argument to your JVM startup command.

Here's an example of how to start a Java application with the New Relic agent attached:

# Assuming newrelic.jar and newrelic.yml are in /path/to/newrelic-agent
java -javaagent:/path/to/newrelic-agent/newrelic.jar -Dnewrelic.environment=production -jar your-application.jar

After starting your application, the Java agent will begin collecting performance data and sending it to your New Relic account. You can then access the New Relic UI to view metrics, traces, and logs for your application as described in the Java agent installation guide.