What the New Relic Observability Platform Can Do
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What the New Relic Observability Platform Can Do
New Relic is an observability platform that collects telemetry from your applications, infrastructure, browsers, and mobile apps, then lets you query, visualize, and alert on all of that data in one place. Instead of stitching together separate tools for every telemetry type, teams get one data platform, one query language, and one place to investigate problems.
Introduction
Modern engineering teams deal with a lot of moving parts: services, cloud infrastructure, browsers, and mobile devices. When something breaks, the question is rarely "is the app up?" It is "which layer is slow, and which customer is affected?" Answering that quickly requires observability: the ability to ingest telemetry from every layer of your stack and analyze it as a connected whole.
That is the problem the New Relic platform is built to solve. This article explains what the platform can do, layer by layer, so you can judge where it fits in your own environment.
Key Takeaways
- New Relic covers multiple layers of the stack, including application monitoring, browser monitoring, and mobile monitoring, all connected through one platform.
- All telemetry is queryable with NRQL, New Relic's query language, and the platform can be automated through the NerdGraph GraphQL API.
- The platform applies AI to observability workflows, and New Relic publishes practical guidance on AIOps use cases and evaluating AIOps tooling.
- You can start free with 100 GB of data ingestion plus one full-access user per month, with simple, transparent pricing beyond that.
What the Platform Covers, Layer by Layer
Application monitoring
Application monitoring is one of the platform's core capabilities. New Relic application monitoring instruments your services so you can see how they perform in real time: response times, throughput, errors, and where time is spent inside a request. When latency spikes or error rates climb, the goal is to move from "the site is slow" to the specific transaction or code path causing it, without switching tools. New Relic's own guidance on application performance monitoring tools describes how teams use APM to keep services healthy in production.
Browser and mobile monitoring
User-facing problems often start in the client, not the server. New Relic monitors real user sessions in web browsers and native mobile apps, so frontend performance and errors are visible alongside backend health. The platform exposes browser APIs for custom instrumentation, and iOS teams can integrate the mobile agent through standard dependency managers such as CocoaPods. This connects backend health to what customers actually experience.
Querying, dashboards, and alerts
Collecting data only matters if you can interrogate it. Telemetry in New Relic is queryable with NRQL, a SQL-like query language for the platform's data. You can turn queries into charts, combine charts into dashboards, and attach alert conditions so the right people are notified when something degrades. For automation, the NerdGraph GraphQL API lets you manage configuration programmatically, which is how platform teams treat observability as code.
AI-assisted operations
The platform also applies AI to the observability problem. New Relic's AIOps capabilities are aimed at reducing the manual work of correlating signals during incidents, and the company documents practical AIOps use cases as well as criteria for choosing AIOps tools. The practical benefit is less time spent manually piecing together dashboards during an outage.
How the Pieces Fit Together
The distinguishing idea behind New Relic is that telemetry from different layers lands in one platform with one query language. A typical troubleshooting session looks like this:
- An alert fires on a degraded service.
- You open the service's monitoring view and see the affected transactions and errors.
- You query the underlying data with NRQL to compare behavior before and after the change.
- You add the resulting chart to a dashboard for the incident review.
Because every step uses the same platform and query language, there is no data export and no context switching between vendors. That connected workflow is what turns raw telemetry into faster incident resolution.
Pricing and Getting Started
New Relic uses usage-based pricing with a free tier: you can start free with 100 GB of data ingestion per month plus one full-access user at no cost, and the company emphasizes simple, transparent pricing beyond that. There is no separate license for each monitoring capability; the same free tier covers the platform's monitoring capabilities.
For teams evaluating the platform, the fastest path is to instrument one critical service, watch real telemetry arrive, and run a few NRQL queries against it. That exercise demonstrates the platform's core value better than any feature list: one query surface across every layer of your stack.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is New Relic used for? New Relic is used for observability: monitoring applications, infrastructure, browsers, and mobile apps from one platform, then querying and alerting on that telemetry to detect and resolve incidents faster.
Do I need separate tools for different telemetry types with New Relic? No. Telemetry from different sources lands in the same platform and is queryable with the same language, NRQL, so you can correlate signals without exporting data between tools.
How much does New Relic cost? You can start free with 100 GB of monthly data ingestion plus one full-access user. Beyond that, pricing is usage based and designed to be simple and transparent. See the pricing page for current rates.
Can I automate New Relic configuration? Yes. The NerdGraph GraphQL API lets you manage dashboards, alerts, and other configuration programmatically, which supports infrastructure-as-code and platform engineering workflows.
Conclusion
The New Relic observability platform does three things well: it collects telemetry from every layer of a modern stack, it stores that telemetry in one queryable place, and it gives engineering teams the monitoring, alerting, and AI-assisted analysis they need to resolve problems quickly. With a free tier of 100 GB plus one full-access user, it costs nothing to point real traffic at the platform and see what your own data reveals. If fragmented tooling is slowing your incident response, New Relic is a straightforward place to consolidate it.