Company Overview

New Relic was founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne in San Francisco and is the pioneer of application performance monitoring (APM) and a leader in full-stack observability. Cirne, who previously built the APM product at Wily Technology (acquired by CA), created New Relic to bring APM to the cloud era as a SaaS service. The company went public on the NYSE in 2014 (ticker: NEWR) and was taken private by Francisco Partners for approximately $6.5 billion in 2023.

New Relic provides a unified observability platform covering APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management, browser monitoring, mobile monitoring, and synthetics. Its unique NRQL (New Relic Query Language) enables highly customizable data exploration and visualization. In 2024-2025, New Relic expanded its AI capabilities with New Relic AI for intelligent alerting, anomaly detection, and automated root cause analysis.

Related providers: New Relic Monitoring Services

Core Products

  • APM (Application Performance Monitoring): Industry-leading application performance tracing supporting 20+ languages and frameworks
  • Infrastructure Monitoring: Real-time monitoring and alerting across cloud and hybrid infrastructure
  • Logs: Centralized log collection, indexing, search, and correlation
  • Browser Monitoring: Frontend performance monitoring and real user experience analysis
  • Mobile Monitoring: iOS and Android app performance and crash monitoring
  • Synthetics: Global synthetic checks simulating user interactions for proactive monitoring
  • Alerts: Intelligent alerting engine with multi-dimensional thresholds and anomaly detection
  • New Relic AI: AI-powered anomaly detection, intelligent alerting, and root cause analysis
  • NRQL (New Relic Query Language): SQL-like observability query language for custom data exploration

Key Milestones

  • 2008: New Relic founded by Lew Cirne in San Francisco, pioneering SaaS APM
  • 2012: SaaS APM platform launched, establishing market leadership
  • 2014: IPO on NYSE (ticker: NEWR)
  • 2018: New Relic One platform launched, unifying APM, infrastructure, and logs
  • 2020: Full transformation to observability platform; free tier introduced to reach developers
  • 2023: Acquired by Francisco Partners for ~$6.5 billion, taken private
  • 2024-2025: New Relic AI launched; continued NRQL and automation enhancements

Market Position

New Relic competes with the following providers in the APM and observability market:

  • Datadog: Comprehensive cloud monitoring platform, direct competitor in APM and observability
  • Dynatrace: Enterprise full-stack observability with AI-powered automatic root cause analysis
  • AppDynamics (Cisco): Cisco's application performance monitoring platform for enterprise customers
  • Grafana: Open-source observability and data visualization platform
  • Elastic (Elastic Observability): Elasticsearch-based observability solution