To read this full New Relic blog, click here.

Today, we’re announcing the launch of our connected infrastructure and application performance monitoring (APM) solution—an observability experience that allows you to correlate your performance across infrastructure, APM, and the rest of your stack to remediate problems faster than ever, without swiveling between tools. And New Relic consumption-based pricing eliminates peak billing and predatory pricing practices of other observability vendors, allowing you to consolidate all of your telemetry data onto a single observability platform at 1/3rd the cost.

Solution highlights

Eliminate screen swivels and data silos

• Integrated infrastructure experiences inside APM: View CPU and memory for hosts, containers, and VMs within APM to instantly identify under-provisioned resources that are impacting apps.
• At-a-glance estate and impact view: See the status and count of hosts, apps, events, and alerts activity to understand overall system health. And with embedded change tracking, easily detect application deployment impacts to host performance.
• In-context application health: Dynamic charts provide host- and APM-specific metrics to correlate drops in performance across infrastructure and the apps running on them.

Eliminate peak billing and paying 3x the costs

• Up to 1/3rd the cost of competitors: Consumption-based pricing with no additional charges for custom metrics provides up to 3x the value of Datadog.
• No peak billing: Pay only for what you use and avoid Datadog’s high watermark (peak) usage billing when environments scale up.
• Consistent per-GB pricing: Datadog charges for custom metrics separately and at a higher rate than host-based prices, resulting in invoices with surprise costs and penalties.

“Our applications need to keep pace with our customers, and integrating multiple tools is a timely and costly process. With New Relic's all-in-one infrastructure monitoring solution, we can diagnose host-driven performance issues by correlating the health of our applications and hosts in real-time, quickly detect anomalous behavior, and deploy fixes—all while reducing operational expenditures.”

–Rizwan Nazir, Director of SRE Engineering Operations at Digicert

To watch this full YouTube video, click here.

Eliminate screen swivel and data silos

Applications rely on healthy, performant, and scalable infrastructure, but using different tools to monitor applications and infrastructure performance creates data silos that prevent you from understanding how the layers of your stack impact each other. Moving between tools and data silos can be time consuming and prohibitively expensive, and ultimately prevents you from quickly debugging issues before they’ve impacted your customers.

APM UI updates

The new infrastructure monitoring experience connects the dots across your hosts and services, and embeds these new performance data in the APM and infrastructure monitoring UIs. It helps you navigate seamlessly up and down your stack, so you can easily identify and analyze the interaction between your hosts and the applications running on top of them.

• CPU and memory for hosts, containers, and VMs: See how your infrastructure is performing for each service, making it fast and simple to identify under-provisioned resources that are impacting your services.
• Related entities automap: Easily identify connected entities, their performance, and anomalous behavior over time. With Timewarp, you can step backwards in time and understand how an issue has propagated through the architecture, enabling you to track it back to where and when it started.

View of the new APM UI. The new infrastructure section (in green) shows CPU and memory for hosts, containers, and VMs.

Infrastructure monitoring UI (brand new!)

This release brings an entirely new infrastructure experience with opinionated workflows. When you select a host, VM, or container in the APM UI, you’ll be taken to the new infrastructure experience that is scoped to only show data for the service you’re investigating, helping you debug even faster.

• In-context application health: Dynamic charts provide host- and APM-specific metrics to correlate drops in performance across infrastructure and the applications running on them.
• At-a-glance estate view: See the status and count of hosts, applications, and events (dynamically adjusted as data is filtered), along with an alerts activity stream to understand overall system health.
• Embedded change tracking: Analyze how application deployments impact host performance, with change tracking embedded directly in the new infrastructure experience.
• Filter suggestions: Filter hosts by attributes and compare their performance with inventory change events to determine root causes, with alert notifications to proactively prevent problems.

View of the new Infra UI. Filtering capabilities (in green) enable users to filter hosts by attributes and compare their performance to determine root causes. The scorecards (in pink) dynamically show the number of hosts, applications, and events related to the chosen filters. The dynamic charts (in blue) correlate performance degradation across host and APM entities, and the related change markers (in orange) identify how application deployments impact host performance.

Existing infrastructure monitoring capabilities

If you’re new to New Relic or our infrastructure monitoring solution, in addition to the exciting new capabilities above, the existing capabilities below make monitoring your infrastructure easy.

• Lookout: View entities that deviate from normal behavior with signals (ex: throughput, response time, and errors), and identify unusual trends or behaviors.
• Navigator: Explore large numbers of entities with a view that shows your entire estate in a honeycomb view with traffic light colors based on alerts.
• Inventory–software monitoring: Assess current software settings across your hosts, identify configuration drift in your fleet, and uncover outdated software or problematic settings.
• Changes to infrastructure events: Correlate recent host activity with changes in behavior. Monitor host and config changes to reduce the impacts to the health and behavior of your applications.
• Network, process, and storage tabs specifically filtered to group data and correlate with the host entity.

Stop paying for peak billing and 3x the costs

No peak billing

The chart below from our underlying spreadsheet demonstrates how a representative customer’s bill can be much higher than the commitment, since Datadog charges per host at the 99% highest usage hour for the month. Conversely, New Relic bills for actual usage at a low price per GB, saving you money and making it affordable for you to monitor your entire estate without making tradeoffs.

Auto-scaling penalties with Datadog

Comparison of monthly Datadog bill (99% peak usage) and New Relic (actual usage) based on published prices.

Consistent per-GB pricing

Many teams have standardized on New Relic due to the simplicity around pricing all telemetry sources at the same rate—without any penalties or hidden costs buried in the contract terms. Alternate pricing models, such as those of Datadog or Dynatrace, charge separately for custom metrics and third-party data at a cost that’s higher than their standard (host-based) pricing.

And it doesn’t end there. Combining infrastructure monitoring and APM costs shows that New Relic provides 5x+ the value of Datadog and 2x+ the value of Dynatrace for large teams. This analysis is based on publicly available list prices, with additional details and assumptions regarding these calculations.

Sample APM and infra monthly cost by engineering team size

Monthly APM and infrastructure monitoring cost comparison summary for New Relic, Dynatrace, and Datadog (all dollar amounts are in USD)

Up to 1/3rd the cost of competitors

At $23/host with annual billing, or $27/host for monthly or on-demand billing, Datadog becomes prohibitively expensive as you scale, especially when factoring in additional charges for custom metrics and overages.1

The following table from our previous cost comparison illustrates a hypothetical example of how per-GB and per-user prices would factor into the New Relic bill, and provides a cost comparison with Datadog.

You can’t afford to spend 3x as much on infrastructure monitoring with Datadog, especially when doing so creates data silos that hold you back.

Infrastructure monitoring monthly cost for 10,000 hosts and 100 engineers

Start monitoring infrastructure easily with 200+ quickstarts

New Relic quickstarts bundle integrations with pre-built dashboards and alerting, making setup a breeze. You’ll find 200+ infrastructure quickstarts for servers, databases, message queues, and other infrastructure types, including over 130 quickstarts from hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Quickstarts by category

Complete list of quickstarts available here, including additional categories like security, logging, open source monitoring, Prometheus, and MLOps.

1. All dollar amounts are in USD. Please refer to the linked spreadsheet for details and assumptions regarding these calculations.
2. Based on published price points at datadoghq.com/pricing as of December 8, 2021.
3. Calculation includes an assumption of 13 GB of monthly ingest per host. The New Relic data ingest cost (standard retention) was updated on May 8, 2022, based on ingest pricing updates.

To read this full New Relic blog, click here.