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Free-Limited
Tool Comparison
New Relic
Full-stack observability — metrics, logs, traces, and errors in one platform.
VS
At a Glance
| Attribute | New Relic | Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| License / Pricing | Free-Limited | Free-Limited |
| Type | DevOps | DevOps |
| GitHub Stars | — | — |
| Rating | 4.4/5 | 4.6/5 |
| Key Features | 6 listed | 6 listed |
| Integrations | 5 listed | 5 listed |
| Categories | ObservabilityMonitoring | MonitoringObservability |
Key Features
New Relic
- APM with distributed tracing for 15+ languages
- Unified telemetry: metrics, logs, events, and traces in one query interface
- NRQL — New Relic Query Language for flexible data exploration
- Synthetics for proactive endpoint monitoring from 20+ global locations
- Error inbox for tracking and triaging application errors
- AIOps: intelligent alert correlation to reduce notification noise
Grafana
- 50+ native data source connectors: Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB, and more
- Rich panel library: graphs, heatmaps, tables, gauges, and stat panels
- Dashboard-as-code with JSON and Grafonnet for version control
- Unified alerting across all connected data sources
- Grafana Loki for cost-effective log aggregation
- Grafana Tempo for distributed tracing alongside metrics
Real-World Use Cases
New Relic
Root cause analysis for a production incident
Alert fires on a spike in error rate detected by New Relic APM
Kubernetes cluster observability
Deploy the New Relic infrastructure agent as a DaemonSet
Grafana
Full-stack observability for a microservice
Connect Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for traces
Infrastructure capacity planning
Pull node and pod CPU and memory metrics from Prometheus
Integrations
New Relic
kubernetesprometheusgrafanaelastic-observabilityansible
Grafana
prometheuselastic-observabilitydatadognewrelickubernetes
🏆 Which should you choose?
Choose New Relic if…
- → you're already in the Observability ecosystem and prefer New Relic's workflow
Choose Grafana if…
- → you're already in the Monitoring ecosystem and prefer Grafana's workflow