Analytics and monitoring decision
New Relic
A competent engineer can build and run a usable core metrics/logs/dashboards stack (Prometheus/Grafana/Loki) for modest scale, but New Relic's AI-driven monitoring, large integrations catalogue, hosted scaling, and enterprise compliance are costly to replicate — keep paying if you need those features or scale.
Visit website↗$10/mo
$120/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$0/mo10 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All New Relic alternatives, with the arithmetic →
Code New Relic publishes itself
Not a way out of the subscription - these are the vendor’s own repositories. Worth a look for how they build, and for anything you would have to integrate with.
- newrelic/newrelic-ruby-agent★1,210 GitHub starsApache-2.0New Relic RPM Ruby Agent↗
- newrelic/node-newrelic★1,001 GitHub starsApache-2.0New Relic Node.js agent code base. Developers are welcome to create pull requests here, please see our contributing guidelines. For New Relic technical support, please go to http://support.newrelic.com.↗
- newrelic/go-agent★838 GitHub starsApache-2.0New Relic Go Agent↗
What a replacement has to do
- Collect telemetry (metrics, traces, logs), index/store events, run queries/dashboards, and alert on thresholds/anomalies.
What it still won’t have
- AI/agentic monitoring and automated remediation (New Relic Autopilot / SRE Agent)
- New Relic AI features such as session replay with AI and agent tracing for hallucinations
- Advanced compute-based features (Transaction 360, Security RX, New Relic AI)
- Large prebuilt integrations catalogue and out-of-the-box connectors
- Enterprise SLAs, FedRAMP/HIPAA-ready Data Plus options, and hosted scale
What remains hard
- Integration maintenance
800+ pre-built integrations
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted observability stack using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus (metrics), Grafana (dashboards), Loki (logs) and Alertmanager. In scope: instrument one sample service (Node or Python) with OpenTelemetry, deploy Prometheus + Alertmanager + Grafana + Loki on a single VM or Kubernetes cluster, implement ingestion pipelines, store 30 days of metrics, create 5 dashboards, and configure basic threshold and anomaly alerts with webhook notifications. Out of scope: full APM distributed sampling optimization, session-replay UX tooling, enterprise compliance (FedRAMP/HIPAA), and advanced AI-driven root-cause analysis. Include error handling, deployment scripts (Helm manifests or Docker Compose), automated tests for ingestion/query paths, and README with upgrade and maintenance steps.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productNew Relic home
- official pricingNew Relic pricing
- official docsNew Relic docs
- open sourceSigNoz/signoz
- open sourceopenobserve/openobserve
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
