2 Best Open Source New Relic Alternatives

New Relic is a hosted observability platform that collects application performance metrics, infrastructure data, logs, and traces into one dashboard. Engineering teams use it to track error rates, response times, and system health, and to get alerted when something breaks in production. It's a software-as-a-service product, meaning agents installed in your application ship telemetry data to New Relic's cloud.

Cost is the most common reason teams look elsewhere. New Relic pricing is based on data ingested and users, and it can climb quickly once an application generates meaningful volumes of logs and metrics, particularly for teams with many services or high request volumes. Sending detailed application and infrastructure data to a third party is also a concern for organizations with strict data governance requirements, since observability data often contains hints about internal architecture, user behavior, or even sensitive request payloads if logging isn't scrubbed carefully.

Grafana paired with Prometheus is the standard open-source combination. Prometheus collects and stores time-series metrics, and Grafana turns them into dashboards and alerts. Both can be self-hosted, with no per-metric billing, and the combination has become something of a default in the cloud-native ecosystem, meaning most infrastructure tools already expose Prometheus-compatible metrics out of the box.

Before migrating, check what your applications currently instrument through New Relic's agents, since moving to Prometheus typically means adopting a different instrumentation approach, often via OpenTelemetry, rather than a drop-in agent swap. Consider whether you need long-term metric retention, which requires additional storage tooling beyond a base Prometheus install, and whether your team has the capacity to operate and scale the monitoring stack itself, since that operational burden shifts from New Relic to you.