SigNoz - Open Source Alternative to New Relic
If you're looking for an open-source alternative to New Relic, then you're at the right place. SigNoz is a perfect open-source alternative to New Relic. SigNoz provides a unified UI for metrics, traces and logs with advanced tagging and filtering capabilities.
In today's digital economy, more and more companies are shifting to cloud-native and microservice architecture to support global scale and distributed teams. But distributed systems also make it impossible for engineering teams to track how user requests perform across services. Application performance monitoring tools provide the visibility needed to resolve performance issues quickly in distributed systems.
New Relic is a capable SaaS tool for application performance monitoring. However, enterprise SaaS products present a few distinct challenges and aren't necessarily a fit for every company.
Some of the challenges with tools like New Relic includes:
- It is cloud-only, so not suitable for companies that have concerns with sending data outside their infra
- For any small feature, you are dependent on their roadmap. We think this is an unnecessary restriction for a product which developers use. A product used by developers should be extendible
- Complex pricing. New Relic's pricing can include data ingestion plus billable user types (basic, core, full platform), or you can opt into their compute-based model with no user licenses. Either way, costs can escalate quickly as your team and data volumes grow.
- Pricing plans of enterprise tools can sometimes leave you in a lurch with frequent changes.
What makes a good observability tool?
A good observability tool should bring logs, metrics, and traces together under a single pane of glass with out-of-the-box application metrics so you can start monitoring from day one. More importantly, it should let you move seamlessly between these three pillars of observability, for example, clicking on a latency spike in a metric chart and landing directly on the traces that caused it.
Fine-grained filtering on tags and attributes, dynamic alert thresholds, and transparent pricing are equally important so that the tool scales with your needs without surprising you with hidden costs.
Why choose an open-source alternative to New Relic?
APM and observability tools are critical tools in a developer's kit. These tools improve developer efficiency, save bandwidth by resolving issues quickly, and increase developer productivity.
An open-source product is always a better choice for any developer tool. Some of the key advantages of open-source developer tools are:
Open Codebase: Developers can judge the quality of the code of the tool they want to choose and work with.
Extensibility: If an extra feature or customization is required, developers can build on top of the open-source tool without waiting for the enterprise support team to include their request in the next product cycle.
Community Support: One of the best parts about open-source projects is the community. An example is OpenTelemetry, which is becoming the world standard for generating and managing telemetry data in cloud-native applications.
Transparency: With open-source projects, you know what you're dealing with. There is no black box.
On-Prem Installation: If your data privacy policies are stringent, you can self-host open-source tools within your own infrastructure. This helps with data residency and reduces third-party data transfers, though you still need to implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to comply with regulations like GDPR.
But most open-source projects don't provide a great user experience as SaaS products do. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them working, figuring out the long-term storage, etc.
And that's where SigNoz shines. It is very simple to get started, supports multiple tech-stack, and comes with a SaaS-like web user experience.
Migrate from New Relic - Save up to 67% on your New Relic bill
Tired of New Relic's user-based pricing? Even for teams of 10-15 devs, New Relic's pricing for user seats can be a significant portion of your monthly bill.
Key Features of SigNoz as a New Relic Alternative
SigNoz is designed to give engineering teams everything they need for full-stack observability, without the vendor lock-in or unpredictable costs that come with New Relic. Here's what sets it apart:
- Unified Observability in a Single Pane of Glass: SigNoz brings metrics, traces, and logs into one platform with out-of-the-box application metrics, exceptions monitoring, and messaging queue monitoring. New Relic offers similar breadth, but full platform access is governed by user types (basic, core, full platform) under their data combined with user model, and costs can add up quickly for larger teams.
- OpenTelemetry-Native Architecture: SigNoz is built on OpenTelemetry from the ground up, so you instrument once with open standards and keep your data portable. It supports any language or framework that OpenTelemetry supports. New Relic also offers OpenTelemetry support, but its platform is still designed around its own proprietary agents.
- Transparent, Usage-Based Pricing with Self-Hosting Options: SigNoz Cloud charges based on how much data you send, there are no per-user charges, no per-host fees, and no separate charges for custom metrics. New Relic's pricing combines data ingestion costs with per-user charges that can get expensive for larger teams. SigNoz is also fully open source, so you can self-host it with Docker Compose or Helm to keep full control over data residency and costs.
- LLM Observability: SigNoz provides out-of-the-box monitoring for LLM applications with support for 30+ providers and frameworks. Track token usage, latency, error rates, and costs with OpenTelemetry. New Relic offers AI monitoring as a paid add-on through its Advanced Compute pricing.
Application Metrics
Get out of the box p90, p99 latencies, RPS, Error rates and top endpoints for a service out of the box.
Seamless Flow Between Telemetry Signals
Powered by OpenTelemetry's semantic conventions, you can quickly jump between telemetry signals in SigNoz. Found something suspicious in a metric, just click that point in the graph & get details of traces which may be causing the issues. Seamless, Intuitive.
Similarly, we have enabled correlation between other telemetry signals.
APM Metrics to Traces & Logs
Traces to Logs & Metrics
If you see an API call taking more time than usual, click on the span to see its details. From the "Related Signals" panel, you can jump to the related logs or view associated infrastructure metrics to investigate further.
Similarly you can click on detailed view of logs and then go to related trace ID to see the flow of user requests.
Infrastructure Monitoring
SigNoz has a dedicated Infrastructure Monitoring section that gives you a unified view of your hosts and Kubernetes clusters.
For hosts, you can drill into any machine to see CPU usage, memory, system load average, and network traffic, along with tabs to view related logs, traces, containers, and processes, all in one place.
For Kubernetes, you can filter by pod, namespace, and node to monitor CPU and memory usage at the pod level, with tabs to jump to related logs, traces, and events.
Advanced Query Builder for All Telemetry Signals with Quick Filters
For all telemetry signals, there are quick filters to quickly filter out the data needed. We have built customized query builders for each signal to make your troublshooting work easier.
For example, query builder for traces allows you to create queries for finding the p99 latency of services. You can also use quick filters to quickly filter the data that you need.
You can create custom metrics from filtered traces to find metrics of any type of request. Want to find p99 latency of customer_type: premium who are seeing status_code:400. Just set the filters, and you have the graph. Boom!
Flamegraphs & Gantt Charts
Detailed flamegraph & Gantt charts to find the exact cause of the issue and which underlying requests are causing the problem. Is it a SQL query gone rogue or a Redis operation is causing an issue? Get more context on your spans with tags and events.
Exceptions Monitoring
Monitor exceptions automatically in Python, Java, Ruby, and Javascript. For other languages, just drop in a few lines of code and start monitoring exceptions.
Messaging Queue Monitoring
SigNoz provides built-in, OpenTelemetry-powered monitoring for Kafka and Celery. Track consumer lag, producer latency, partition-level metrics, and drop rates from a single view, and correlate queue performance with your application traces to pinpoint bottlenecks faster.
LLM Observability
Monitor your LLM-powered applications with out-of-the-box dashboards for token usage, latency, error rates, and cost analysis. SigNoz supports 30+ LLM providers and frameworks all instrumented through OpenTelemetry with no proprietary SDK required.
Simple Usage-Based Pricing with Cost Control Features
Open-source SigNoz is free to self-host and use. SigNoz cloud is the easiest way of running SigNoz without any hassle of maintenance. For cloud, we have a simple usage-based pricing based on amount of data sent.
- Logs: $0.3/GB ingested
- Traces: $0.3/GB ingested
- Metrics: $0.1/mil samples
Check out our pricing plans for more details. You can also estimate your monthly bill using the pricing calculator.
Getting Started With SigNoz
You can choose between various deployment options in SigNoz. The easiest way to get started with SigNoz is SigNoz Cloud. We offer a 30-day free trial account with access to all features.
Those with data privacy concerns who can’t send their data outside their infrastructure can sign up for either the enterprise self-hosted or BYOC offering.
Those with the expertise to manage SigNoz themselves, or who want to start with a free, self-hosted option, can use our community edition.
SigNoz vs New Relic Comparison Table
| Feature | SigNoz | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open-source | Proprietary SaaS |
| Pricing | Free (self-hosted) | Tiered pricing plans |
| Installation | On-premise or cloud | SaaS platform (agents/collectors installed on your infra, telemetry sent to New Relic) |
| Data Privacy | Data stays within your infrastructure | Data stored on New Relic servers |
| Customization | Fully customizable | Limited to available features |
| OpenTelemetry Support | Native support | Supported |
| User Interface | Modern, unified UI for metrics, traces, and logs | Comprehensive but can be complex |
| Learning Curve | Moderate | Steep |
| Community Support | Growing open-source community | Large established community |
| Enterprise Support | Community-driven | 24/7 professional support |
| Scalability | Highly scalable (depends on your infrastructure) | Highly scalable |
| Integration Ecosystem | Growing, focuses on open standards | Extensive |
| Alerting | Customizable alerting with query builder | Advanced alerting capabilities |
| APM Features | Full-stack observability | Full-stack observability |
| Log Management | Integrated log management | Integrated log management |
| Infrastructure Monitoring | Supported | Supported |
| Distributed Tracing | Supported | Supported |
| Custom Dashboards | Fully customizable | Customizable with some limitations |
| Messaging Queue Monitoring | Built-in Kafka & Celery monitoring via OpenTelemetry | Supported via separate integrations |
| LLM Observability | Built-in support for 30+ LLM providers via OpenTelemetry | Available as a paid add-on (Advanced Compute) |
Note: Features and pricing may change over time. Always check the official websites for the most up-to-date information.
FAQs
What is the New Relic equivalent open-source?
SigNoz is an excellent open-source alternative to New Relic. It provides similar functionality for application performance monitoring and observability, with the added benefits of being open-source, such as transparency, extensibility, and on-premise installation options.
Is SigNoz open-source?
Yes, SigNoz is fully open-source. Its codebase is publicly available, allowing developers to inspect, modify, and contribute to the project. This transparency is one of the key advantages SigNoz offers over proprietary solutions like New Relic.
What are the key features of SigNoz as a New Relic alternative?
SigNoz offers several key features that make it a strong alternative to New Relic:
- Unified UI for metrics, traces, and logs
- Out-of-the-box application metrics
- Seamless flow between metrics, traces, and logs
- Advanced filtering and tagging capabilities
- Custom aggregates on trace data
- Detailed flamegraphs and Gantt charts
- Native support for OpenTelemetry
- Messaging queue monitoring for Kafka and Celery
- LLM observability with support for 30+ providers
- Transparent usage-based pricing
How does SigNoz compare to New Relic in terms of pricing?
While New Relic has complex pricing that combines data ingestion with per-user fees, SigNoz offers simple usage-based pricing based only on the data you send. We recommend SigNoz Cloud for production workloads to avoid the hassle of infrastructure maintenance. For development or testing environments, you can use our free, self-hosted Community Edition.
Does SigNoz support OpenTelemetry like New Relic?
Yes, SigNoz is built to support OpenTelemetry natively. This is a significant advantage as OpenTelemetry is becoming the world standard for generating and managing telemetry data in cloud-native applications. New Relic also supports OpenTelemetry, but SigNoz's native support may offer better integration and performance.
Can SigNoz be installed on-premises unlike New Relic?
Yes, one of the key advantages of SigNoz over New Relic is that it can be installed on-premises. This is particularly beneficial for companies with strict data privacy policies or those that prefer to keep their monitoring data within their own infrastructure.
How does SigNoz handle logs compared to New Relic?
SigNoz provides comprehensive logs management capabilities, including an advanced log query builder and live tailing for real-time log monitoring. This functionality is comparable to New Relic's logging features, but with the added benefit of being part of an open-source, self-hosted solution.
Is SigNoz suitable for monitoring microservices architectures like New Relic?
Absolutely. SigNoz is designed to handle distributed systems and microservices architectures. It provides the necessary tools to track user requests across multiple services, making it well-suited for modern, complex application environments, similar to New Relic's capabilities in this area.
Does SigNoz support LLM observability?
Yes. SigNoz provides built-in LLM observability with support for 30+ providers and frameworks. You can track token usage, latency, error rates, and costs all instrumented through OpenTelemetry.
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