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New Relic

Challenger#14 in Developer Tools

Observability platform taken private by Francisco Partners for $6.5B; unified APM, logs, and traces with generous free tier and New Relic AI natural language querying for engineering teams.

Best for: Observability/APM
45
AI Score
Grade C↑ Trending
AI Visibility Score (Beta)
Developer ToolsObservability/APMWebsiteUpdated March 2026

Brand Intelligence Graph

Competes with
Integrates with
Capabilities
Observability/APM

Company Overview

About New Relic

New Relic is an observability platform providing application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, distributed tracing, log management, and synthetic monitoring for engineering teams building and operating software. Founded in 2008 in San Francisco by Lew Cirne (who previously founded Wily Technology, acquired by CA Technologies) and listed on NYSE, New Relic was acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG in November 2023 for approximately $6.5 billion, taking the company private after years as a public company.

Business Model & Competitive Advantage

New Relic's platform (New Relic One) was rebuilt from its original per-product pricing model into a unified consumption-based platform where customers ingest all telemetry data (metrics, events, logs, traces) into one platform and pay per data volume ingested. This "all-in-one" repositioning sought to compete more directly with Datadog's unified observability platform, though the transition required significant customer re-education and temporarily impacted revenue predictability.

Competitive Landscape 2025–2026

In 2025, New Relic under private equity ownership is executing a refocused strategy emphasizing its free tier (100GB/month forever free), which has driven developer adoption, and its AI-powered anomaly detection and alert correlation. The company introduced New Relic AI (Grok) — an AI assistant for querying observability data in natural language. New Relic competes with Datadog (the market leader), Dynatrace, Grafana, and newer players like Middleware and Last9. The private equity ownership allows restructuring for profitability without public market scrutiny. The 2025 strategy focuses on developer-led growth through the free tier, enterprise expansion, and AI-powered observability features that reduce the complexity of managing modern distributed systems.

Founded
2008
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Curated content • Fact-checked and verified

The New Relic Story

San Francisco, California
Founded by Lew Cirne (2008 Wily application performance monitoring full-stack observability)

The Breakthrough Moment

Lew Cirne created New Relic in San Francisco in 2008 from Wily Technology as application performance monitoring platform for full-stack observability with APM, infrastructure, browser, mobile, synthetic monitoring, and distributed tracing before IPO 2014 then private in 2024 as SaaS pioneer with Ruby agent

Original Mission

"Democratize data make every engineer data-driven"

Founders

Lew Cirne (2008 Wily application performance monitoring full-stack observability)

Recent Activity

View all →
blog_post
Building Future-Proof Observability with OpenTelemetry APIs and New Relic Agents

Adopt OpenTelemetry APIs without losing your APM tools using the New Relic hybrid agent. Build vendor-neutral, future-proof observability seamlessly.

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Navigating SAP Transformation: A Technical Blueprint for De-Risking Migrations with New Relic

As organizations managing significant changes to their core SAP service, we explore how they can de-risk their migration journeys with New Relic

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Celebrating Pride and Community Across Our Global Teams

Explore how New Relic drives LGBTQIA+ inclusion through global community impact and a perfect Human Rights Campaign score.

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Top Sentry Alternatives to Improve Error Management And System Insights

Explore the best Sentry alternatives that unify error tracking, logs, and metrics to improve incident response and reduce alert fatigue for engineering teams.

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New Relic Now June 2026 Round-Up

At New Relic NOW, learn how to navigate AI agent debt in the Superhuman Era by feeding deep production telemetry directly into the development loop.

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FedRAMP® High and DoD Impact Level 4: Stringent data security for high-impact observability

New Relic commits to achieving FedRAMP High and DoD IL4, enabling the strictest security for the most sensitive, mission-critical government workloads.

blog_post
LaunchDarkly Standardized on New Relic. Here's Why It Matters.

LaunchDarkly runs some of the most demanding infrastructure in software delivery. Here's why they chose New Relic as their observability platform.

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New Relic launches New Relic for Startups

New Relic for Startups offers early-stage teams free platform access, full AI capabilities, and engineering support to launch and scale reliable AI applications from day one.

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Introducing New Relic Preflight for AI Coding Observability

Understand where your AI spends time, catch problems before they compound, and keep your workflow moving.

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Accelerating agentic development and incident resolution with New Relic AI + AWS

We’re excited to launch a one-click integration that connects our Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server with Kiro, the AI-native, agentic development environment from AWS.

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Introducing the State of AI Coding 2026

New Relic's 2026 State of AI Coding Report surveys 200 U.S. tech leaders on generative and agentic AI tools moving from personal sandboxes to production pipelines.

blog_post
Logs vs Metrics: What’s the Difference in Observability?

Understand when to use logs vs metrics for effective monitoring and debugging. Learn how a unified approach improves incident response and system insights.

Company Timeline

Major milestones in New Relic's journey

4
Total Events
1
Product Launches

Leadership Team

Meet the leaders behind New Relic

James Patel

Chief Financial Officer

James Patel serves as Chief Financial Officer at New Relic, bringing extensive industry experience and leadership.

Jennifer Davis

Chief Executive Officer

Jennifer Davis serves as Chief Executive Officer at New Relic, bringing extensive industry experience and leadership.

Richard Moore

Chief Operating Officer

Richard Moore serves as Chief Operating Officer at New Relic, bringing extensive industry experience and leadership.

Richard Smith

Chief Marketing Officer

Richard Smith serves as Chief Marketing Officer at New Relic, bringing extensive industry experience and leadership.

Linda Davis

Chief Product Officer

Linda Davis serves as Chief Product Officer at New Relic, bringing extensive industry experience and leadership.

Key Differentiators

Strong Challenger

New Relic is an established challenger with significant market presence and competitive offerings in DevOps.

Frequently Asked Questions

Estimated Visibility Trend (Beta)

Simulated 8-week rolling score

45
↑ Trending

Based on estimated brand signals. Historical tracking coming soon.

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