New Relic has been in the monitoring game longer than most. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne in San Francisco, the company was one of the original pioneers of application performance monitoring (APM). It went public in 2014 and was later taken private in 2023 through a $6.5 billion acquisition by Francisco Partners and TPG.
The platform covers the full observability stack — APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management, browser monitoring, synthetic checks, and more. In 2020, New Relic made a major strategic shift by launching a consumption-based pricing model and offering a generous free tier with 100 GB of data ingest per month. That move opened doors for smaller teams and individual developers who previously couldn’t justify the cost.
Over 16,000 customers use New Relic, including major enterprises and government agencies. The platform ingests trillions of data points daily and supports a wide range of languages including Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, Go, and Node.js.
New Relic’s NRQL query language is one of its standout features — it lets engineers write SQL-like queries against their telemetry data, making it easy to slice and dice metrics without jumping through hoops. While the competitive field has gotten crowded, New Relic’s long track record and recent pricing overhaul keep it relevant for teams of all sizes.
