New Relic
By New Relic, Inc.
New Relic is a full-stack observability platform that monitors application performance, infrastructure, and logs, helping teams detect, diagnose, and resolve production issues.
Definition
New Relic is a full-stack observability platform that monitors application performance, infrastructure, and logs, helping teams detect, diagnose, and resolve production issues.
Overview
Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne, New Relic was among the first companies to popularize application performance monitoring (APM) delivered as a SaaS product, letting engineering teams instrument their applications without building their own monitoring infrastructure from scratch. New Relic instruments applications with lightweight agents that automatically trace requests, database calls, and external service calls, correlating that data with infrastructure metrics, logs, and browser or mobile performance data in one platform. It supports OpenTelemetry-compatible data ingestion, letting teams standardize on open instrumentation while still using New Relic's dashboards, alerting, and query layer (NRQL) on top. It's commonly used alongside or as an alternative to open-source observability stacks built from tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch, and competes with other commercial observability platforms such as Dynatrace.
Key Features
- Automatic application performance monitoring (APM) via lightweight agents
- Distributed tracing across services, databases, and external calls
- Infrastructure monitoring for servers, containers, and cloud resources
- Log management integrated with traces and metrics in one view
- NRQL query language for custom dashboards and alerts
- OpenTelemetry-compatible data ingestion
- Real user monitoring (RUM) for browser and mobile performance
- AI-assisted anomaly detection and incident correlation