
New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation - rbanffy
https://thenewstack.io/new-relic-changes-business-model-open-sources-agents-and-instrumentation/
======
bearjaws
I love NewRelic, but their pricing always baffled me.

When we added it to our QA, UAT, and Staging envs, they started wanting to
bill us as if we had 3x as many "production" environments. I had to explain on
a call that it doesn't make sense that environments that get .0001% of the
production traffic are billed at the exact same price. Basically punishing us
for having a more mature SDLC.

We also run our infrastructure with redundancy, so we got billed for every
region & availability zone, they wanted it to be crazy expensive.

I'm curious how this changes things, the new "pro" pricing is not available
sadly :(

~~~
gboss
This is the exact same situation my company finds itself in. We are stuck with
it because they have decent APM metrics for .NET Java and JavaScript and it’s
nice it’s all in one dashboard. The new UI is pretty difficult to use and way
too bright. Currently exploring other options and would be happy to switch to
a more affordable competitor.

~~~
nreece
We had a similar experience, so I'm just sharing the path we took.

We were using New Relic APM and Server Monitoring through the Microsoft
BizSpark benefits for an year or two. We were even ready to pay for their
licenses, but New Relic pricing for multi-server use was starkly high for a
small tech company like ours. Their product was good, but their focus was more
on enterprise customers.

After trying out many other commercial products (focusing on .NET Core stack
in particular), and keeping long-term scalability and TCO in mind, we decided
to utilize some open source solutions.

First we tried Bosun[1] (from the Stack Exchange team), but found little
progress being made on it. Then, we tried Prometheus[2] collectors for
monitoring, Grafana[3] for the dashboards and alerting, and Exceptional[4] for
logging. One person got it all working within a week. We've never looked back,
and have to hardly touch the set-up anymore (except for system updates once in
a while). It has worked beautifully for almost two years now, going from 2 to
a few dozen apps/servers/VMs.

Hope it helps you, and others, explore the open source monitoring route.

[1] [https://bosun.org](https://bosun.org) [2]
[https://prometheus.io](https://prometheus.io) [3]
[https://grafana.com](https://grafana.com) [4]
[https://github.com/NickCraver/StackExchange.Exceptional](https://github.com/NickCraver/StackExchange.Exceptional)

------
pwarner
It's impressive it took them this long in the face of Datadog and who ever
else pioneered the open source agent approach. It was such a clear advantage
to ensure you knew what was going on your servers, or into your app in the APM
case, and of course you could fix / extend it if needed.

~~~
tnisonoff
Interestingly, Datadog's agent was a fork of Server Density's open-source
agent[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datadog#Technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datadog#Technology)

------
schmichael
> In what New Relic executives described as adjusting to a “sea change” in
> open source adoption

Am I missing something or did this statement strike anyone else as wildly
bizarre?

I feel like open source has been the default for the client side agents and
libraries of SaaS products for 10 years. Microsoft, once the strongest
opponent of open source, changed its tune like 5+ years ago. What could
possibly be the “sea change” this executive is referring to?

~~~
thejonanshow
I've mostly worked for companies that were all in on things like open source
and cloud my entire career, but it's easy to forget that there are huge
companies that just recently replaced their tape drives.

If I were to guess at the "sea change" discussed herein I'd say it's probably
the explosion of tech around Kubernetes and the CNCF, as that created a very
sudden and urgent need for better observability tooling.

\- I typed these words all by myself and they are not official New Relic
words, you can tell because they're not terribly well-formed and they aren't
surrounded by logos and trademarks and buzzwords. Using the haphazardly spewed
opinions of strangers on the internet as investment advice is a really, really
terrible idea; like "open source is a virus" level of bad. Don't do it.

~~~
schmichael
Open source was taking over enterprises long before k8s. There was OpenStack,
Hadoop, and obviously Linux itself has been widely adopted since before New
Relic’s founding (2008).

Arguably micro services have increased the need for observability tooling, but
even that “sea change” is years long in the tooth. Sure large enterprises are
slow to adopt such trends, but it’s been happening and is hardly a sudden
shocking development.

Maybe I’m just being pedantic or nit picky, but it does seem extra worrisome
when the executives for a struggling company say something that sounds
dramatically out of touch.

~~~
thejonanshow
"Open source was taking over enterprises long before k8s"

True, also not related to the point I was trying to make. Executives tend to
be handwavey and vague sometimes but I'm pretty sure the "sea change" they're
talking about in this case is about containerization and the rapid evolution
of open source projects in that space, many of them related to observability.
Kubecon had 500 attendees in 2015 and 12,000 in 2019. It's hard to deny that
the popularity of that community will sway popular opinion about what
technologies to embrace moving forward. I think (and again, I am guessing as I
have exactly zero information that the public does not have) that New Relic
and other companies are in part making decisions like this because it's
becoming clear they will be left behind if they don't, and quickly.

I bet the first post-covid Kubecon will have 20k attendees and be taken over
by the execs and VCs who've realized that's where the devs are, just in time
for the devs to stop going and start the next thing á la reInvent. Wish I had
gone before it blew up.

I also feel like "struggling" is a bit of an overstatement for a company with
a $4B market cap, but maybe that's just me. I'm sure most FAANG4LYFers look at
that like a lemonade stand.

------
mrweasel
Sadly that’s not what is keep our customers off New Relic. They don’t care
that much about open source agent, but they do care about where the server is.

I understand the it’s not triviel to develop, but there is still a huge
underserved marked for on-premise APMs, and those you can buy aren’t nearly as
good as New Relic.

Alas developing non-saas software is not exactly en vogue

~~~
sciurus
Sometimes it is. I was heavily involved with a decision between Datadog vs New
Relic (plus a few others) at a former "unicorn" startup. We definitely did not
want to run the server-side ourselves, but having the client libraries be open
source was a major advantage for Datadog. It let us extend them to support our
very old Django version and homegrown SOA framework

------
sciurus
This is a good move. I wonder why now, though? Possibly they didn't like to
see things like the OpenTracing project adopting Datadog's APM libraries.

[https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/opentelemetry-
instrumentation...](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/opentelemetry-
instrumentation/)

~~~
thejonanshow
My understanding is that it has more to do with the general direction of
observability. The agent code was always open, we frequently accepted PRs from
the community when I was on their Ruby agent team, but they didn't use an open
source license.

We're public so I probably shouldn't guess too much about the motivations
beyond the explosion of interest in observability/kubernetes/cncf, but I do
know there has been support for open sourcing these for a long time within the
company and I'm glad to see it finally happen.

disclosure: I work at NR but my opinions are in fact cake and should not be
used to make investment decisions (seriously that is a terrible idea I mostly
invest in LEGOs and Magic cards)

------
apple4ever
This is good news. Their host based pricing was not great. Especially when
they wanted to charge half price for dev hosts.

We'll see if they can survive it though.

------
blaisio
It's stupid that it was closed source in the first place. The valuable stuff
is on the server side. This is not really anything exciting, if they open
sourced their servers, _that_ would be very interesting.

~~~
kawsper
I agree, but they might have been scared that someone wrote a NewRelic
compatible server.

~~~
dariusj18
Sounds to me like they are now open to the idea, that way more people use some
standard that they can have input on, and then they can capture the customers
that don't want to try and reinvent the wheel.

This looks great to me, often I work on projects with closed systems, they
aren't allowed to ship the telemetry outside their own network, so none of the
SaaS solutions will work. However I work on other projects that I can use
SaaS, but I'm not going to do the work to have two solutions depending on the
environment.

------
pranay01
So does this change in pricing now make New Relic more affordable than
DataDog?

------
liveoneggs
they have let the agents stagnate and are hoping to unleash some free code
from frustrated customers

~~~
thejonanshow
Stagnant seems like an overstatement given 500 commits on one of the agents
alone in the last month. There is surely a way to criticize without devaluing
the unread contributions of literally hundreds of developers.

I personally am much more motivated by seeing customers encouraged to add
support for their favorite libraries and frameworks than scoring their sweet
free codes, but I suppose there is potentially a sinister motive behind
everything in life... like open source.

~~~
liveoneggs
I suppose I am just frustrated by things like no modern solr support, no
support for jenkins when datadog has a great plugin, and not great support for
non-web analytics (at least with python and php which I have plugged into it).

Also you can't copy/query things in from cloudwatch; they just started
supporting EFS/NFS statistics recently after losing them for almost a year
when they killed the old infrastructure agent vs the new one (reduction in
features on new product!)

When I brought up my frustrations with the product after coming back to it
after a few years away they told me "it was all necessary to support
kubernetes"

I guess my tastes in frameworks don't match theirs? They keep cashing the
checks though.

------
didip
I might be mistaken, but I thought they open source their agents in the early
days?

~~~
thejonanshow
Didip! Long time - I'm back at NR as of a month ago after 5yrs away.

We did have all the agent code out in the open but it was more "source
available" than it was open source. You could see what was happening but not
build on it and use it for your own nefarious purposes as you can now.

~~~
didip
Jonan! Long time indeed.

Well, I am glad that they are all open sourced now. It’s a good decision.

