New Relic is a SaaS observability platform that grew out of application performance monitoring (APM) - instrumenting application code to show where request time goes, which database calls are slow, and which transactions throw errors. It later folded metrics, logs, infrastructure, and traces into one telemetry store and repriced around two simple meters: gigabytes of data ingested and per-user seats. That pricing change reshaped how teams use it, because every extra log line and custom event now maps directly to the ingest meter.

The telemetry data platform and NRQL

All four telemetry types land in one store, and you query them with NRQL, a SQL-like language. APM transactions, custom events, metrics, and logs are all queryable through the same dialect, which makes it straightforward to correlate an error spike with the deploy marker that preceded it. A NRQL query reads much like SQL with a time window attached:

SELECT percentile(duration, 95), count(*)
FROM Transaction
WHERE appName = 'checkout-api'
  AND error IS true
FACET name
SINCE 1 hour ago
TIMESERIES

Instrumentation and OpenTelemetry

The traditional path is a language-specific APM agent - a JVM javaagent, a Python package, a Node module - that auto-instruments common frameworks with no code changes and reports back to New Relic. The platform also ingests OpenTelemetry directly, so teams standardizing on vendor-neutral instrumentation can point an OTLP exporter at New Relic's endpoint and keep their data portable. Either way, the agent or exporter attaches an account license key and ships spans and metrics over the wire.

Frequently asked questions

What is New Relic best known for? APM - tracing slow transactions through application code down to the offending query or external call - which remains its strongest area even after the platform broadened to metrics, logs, and infrastructure.

How is it priced? By data ingested (per gigabyte) plus per-user seats, rather than per host. This rewards trimming log and custom-event volume and watching how much each service ingests.

What is NRQL? The New Relic Query Language - a SQL-like dialect for querying every telemetry type in the store, with FACET for grouping and TIMESERIES for charting over a window.

Can I use OpenTelemetry instead of the agents? Yes. New Relic accepts OTLP, so OpenTelemetry-instrumented services export directly without a New Relic-specific agent.

See the monitoring & logging overview and compare with Dynatrace.