New Relic Has a Free Observability Platform — Monitor Your Entire Stack Without Paying a Dime

Your app is slow. Users are complaining. Is it the database? The API? A memory leak? Without observability, you're debugging blind.

New Relic gives you full-stack observability — APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, browser monitoring, synthetic checks — all in one platform. And the free tier is surprisingly generous.

Free Tier (Forever Free)

• 100GB/month of data ingest
• 1 full-platform user
• Unlimited basic users
• All features included — APM, infrastructure, logs, browser, synthetics
• No credit card required

What You Can Monitor

Application Performance (APM)

// Install the agent
// npm install newrelic
// Add to the very first line of your app:
require('newrelic');

const express = require('express');
const app = express();

// New Relic automatically instruments:
// - HTTP requests and response times
// - Database queries (pg, mysql, mongodb)
// - External API calls
// - Error rates and stack traces
// - Transaction traces for slow requests

app.get('/api/users', async (req, res) => {
  const users = await db.query('SELECT * FROM users LIMIT 100');
  res.json(users);
  // New Relic tracks: query time, response time, throughput
});

Custom Instrumentation

const newrelic = require('newrelic');

// Track custom events
newrelic.recordCustomEvent('PurchaseCompleted', {
  userId: user.id,
  amount: order.total,
  items: order.items.length,
  paymentMethod: order.payment
});

// Track custom metrics
newrelic.recordMetric('Custom/CacheHitRate', cacheHits / totalRequests);

// Add custom attributes to transactions
newrelic.addCustomAttributes({
  customerId: req.user.id,
  plan: req.user.plan
});

NRQL — Query Your Data

New Relic Query Language lets you slice and dice your telemetry data:

-- Slowest transactions in the last hour
SELECT average(duration) FROM Transaction
WHERE appName = 'my-app'
FACET name
SINCE 1 hour ago
ORDER BY average(duration) DESC
LIMIT 10

-- Error rate by endpoint
SELECT percentage(count(*), WHERE error IS true) as 'Error Rate'
FROM Transaction
FACET request.uri
SINCE 24 hours ago

-- P99 response time trend
SELECT percentile(duration, 99) FROM Transaction
TIMESERIES 5 minutes
SINCE 6 hours ago

Alerts

// NRQL alert condition example:
// Trigger when error rate exceeds 5% for 5 minutes
// SELECT percentage(count(*), WHERE error IS true)
// FROM Transaction
// WHERE appName = 'production-api'
// THRESHOLD: above 5 for 5 minutes

The Bottom Line

New Relic's free 100GB/month is enough to monitor a small-to-medium production app. Full APM, logs, infrastructure, and alerting — no feature gates on the free tier.

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Need to monitor competitor websites, track pricing changes, or build automated data collection pipelines? I build custom solutions.

📧 Email me: [e-mail]
🔧 My tools: Apify Store