4 Best Open Source New Relic Alternatives

Why choose an open-source New Relic alternative

New Relic bills observability data by ingest volume, which climbs as your systems and telemetry grow, so adding more detailed logging or tracing to debug an issue can itself increase the monthly bill. Self-hosted alternatives put that pipeline on infrastructure you run:

• Data ownership: metrics, logs, and traces are stored on your own infrastructure instead of a third-party observability vendor, keeping detailed system and application data inside your own network.
• Self-hosting: avoid shipping application telemetry outside your network, which matters for systems handling regulated or sensitive data.
• Cost: New Relic pricing scales with data ingested; self-hosted tools have a flat infrastructure cost regardless of how much telemetry you collect.
• Customization: build custom dashboards and alerting rules directly against the underlying data store instead of working within a vendor's fixed alert templates.
• Avoiding lock-in: OpenTelemetry-native data formats replace a proprietary telemetry pipeline, so instrumentation code is not tied to one vendor's SDK.

What to look for

Check OpenTelemetry compatibility for traces, metrics, and logs since that determines how portable your instrumentation is, whether the tool leans toward real-time or historical monitoring depending on your debugging style, the resource footprint of running the monitoring stack itself on your infrastructure, the depth of alerting and anomaly detection available, and how much application performance monitoring coverage is included versus infrastructure-only metrics.

How the top New Relic alternatives compare

• Netdata provides real-time, per-second infrastructure monitoring with minimal setup, aimed at lean teams that need immediate system-level visibility without configuring a separate time-series database.
• SigNoz is OpenTelemetry-native observability combining logs, traces, and metrics in a single application, positioned directly as an alternative to Datadog and New Relic for teams that need full application performance monitoring, not just server metrics.

Netdata is often run alongside another tool rather than in place of a full APM, since its focus stays on infrastructure rather than distributed request tracing. SigNoz covers more of what New Relic is typically used for, including tracing individual requests across services.