New Relic
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| New Relic | |
|---|---|
| Name | New Relic |
| Type | Public |
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Founders | Lew Cirne, Jonah Kowall |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Area served | Global |
| Products | Application performance monitoring, observability, cloud monitoring |
| Num employees | 2,000+ (approx.) |
New Relic is an American observability and telemetry company that provides software analytics and performance monitoring for cloud-native and legacy applications. Founded in 2008, the company develops platforms to collect, process, and visualize telemetry data from applications, infrastructure, and digital customer experiences. New Relic's products are used across industries including Amazon (company), Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and other technology and financial institutions to diagnose incidents, optimize performance, and guide engineering decisions.
History
New Relic was founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne and early team members with roots in companies such as Wily Technology and TraceView. The company grew during the rise of Amazon Web Services and the shift toward DevOps and microservices architectures, attracting venture funding from firms like Y Combinator and Benchmark Capital. It completed an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 amidst a wave of enterprise software listings including Splunk and Box (company). Over the following decade New Relic expanded through product development and partnerships with cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Management changes included executive transitions involving leaders from Salesforce, Adobe, and VMware. Strategic moves and market pressures mirrored trends seen at Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and Datadog as observability became central to modern operations.
Products and Services
New Relic offers a suite of observability tools for application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, log management, synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), and distributed tracing. Key components align with industry practices popularized by projects like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana. The platform provides dashboards, alerting, and AI-assisted incident context similar to features offered by PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and Atlassian tools. Integrations cover ecosystems such as Kubernetes, Docker, Apache Kafka, and Elasticsearch, enabling telemetry from frameworks like Node.js, Java (programming language), Python (programming language), Ruby (programming language), and Go (programming language). Additional services include analytics for business metrics used by clients comparable to Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, and Stripe.
Architecture and Technology
The platform architecture emphasizes high-throughput ingestion, real-time query capability, and scalable storage for metrics, traces, and logs. New Relic adopted telemetry standards influenced by OpenTelemetry while competing with vendors using proprietary agents and protocols like those from AppDynamics and Dynatrace. The backend utilizes distributed processing technologies akin to systems employed by Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, and column-store databases influenced by architectures from Facebook and LinkedIn. Front-end visualization draws lessons from projects such as Grafana and Kibana (software), while integrations with Prometheus enable metric collection in cloud-native environments like Kubernetes clusters managed on Google Kubernetes Engine and Amazon EKS. The platform supports SDKs for mobile platforms including iOS and Android as well as serverless platforms offered by AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions.
Business and Market Position
New Relic competes in the observability and APM market against firms like Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and Splunk. Its go-to-market strategy blends direct sales, channel partners, and marketplace listings within AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace. Customers span startups to large enterprises such as Capital One, Comcast, and GitHub (company), reflecting both horizontal and vertical adoption. The company’s pricing models have evolved in response to market dynamics similar to those affecting Elastic (company) and MongoDB, balancing consumption-based billing with subscription tiers. Strategic partnerships and acquisitions have been used to broaden capabilities, echoing consolidation trends seen across the cloud software sector involving entities like Oracle Corporation and IBM.
Privacy, Security, and Compliance
Security and compliance are central to enterprise adoption; New Relic implements role-based access controls, encryption in transit and at rest, and SOC-type controls paralleling compliance regimes favored by customers working with PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO/IEC 27001. The company aligns platform telemetry controls with expectations from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and collaborates with identity providers like Okta and Ping Identity for single sign-on. Data residency and privacy practices are shaped by legal regimes including GDPR and CCPA, prompting capabilities for data retention controls and regional deployments similar to practices at Salesforce and SAP.
Reception and Criticism
Industry reception has recognized the platform for ease of onboarding and unified telemetry, drawing comparisons to Datadog and praise from engineering teams at firms like Pinterest and Shopify. Criticisms include debates over pricing transparency and cost predictability in high-cardinality telemetry scenarios, echoing concerns raised with Prometheus long-term storage and proprietary pricing models at Splunk. Observability practitioners and analysts from firms such as Gartner and Forrester Research have alternately positioned the company as a leader or challenger depending on evaluation criteria like scalability, integration breadth, and total cost of ownership. Security researchers and some customers have highlighted the need for clearer data governance controls, paralleling dialogues occurring across the cloud monitoring industry involving Elastic and Sumo Logic.