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What does New Relic do?

New Relic is observability software: teams use it to monitor the performance of their apps and infrastructure.

devops

Last updated: July 4, 2025

The TL;DR

New Relic is observability software: teams use it to monitor the performance of their applications and infrastructure.

  • Part of developing a successful application is making sure it stays up and running after you build it
  • The two main areas teams need visibility into are the application layer (APM) and the infrastructure layer (your servers and such)
  • New Relic provides a series of APIs for collecting data from those layers, visualizing it, and digging deeper into why things went wrong

New Relic was one of the first commercially available SaaS products for monitoring (targeted at developers), originally founded in 2008. They went public in 2014 and generated $925.6 million in revenue for fiscal year 2023 [1] From New Relic's most recent 10-K filing: Our revenue for the fiscal years ended March 31, 2023 and 2022 was $925.6 million and $785.5 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 18%..

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Companies Mentioned

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Splunk

$SPLK
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Elastic

$ESTC
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New Relic

$NEWR
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Docker

$PRIVATE

The core New Relic product: observability

Every app that you use on the internet is running on a server somewhere. Developers need to understand what’s going on with their apps and servers so that things run smoothly: they’re checking for how fast things run, what errors they run into, spikes in traffic, and stuff like that.

New Relic offers a comprehensive set of tools for doing all of this stuff, from application to infrastructure and beyond (Datadog is a useful comparison). You start by installing New Relic agents (like little cameras) on your infrastructure, and gathering data. Then you can build interactive visualizations, set up alerts, and dig deeper into specific patterns you’re seeing.

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A brief, brief history of deployment

Every app that you use on the internet is running on a server somewhere. Until recently, that used to literally mean one server - a giant computer - so you had whatever computing power you had, and you had one place to look if you wanted to know why things were broken – or worse, why things were slow. There were basic utilities in Linux – the standard server operating system – for monitoring a lot of this stuff, like the htop command – which is still used a lot, mind you – but this was mostly a reactive process. Something would go wrong, and you’d check why. 

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