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I agree, New Relic's pricing model is almost too "enterprise". Per host pricing seems high, and difficult to scale. It's too bad, because I love everything else they offer. I'm even considering the new Insights service. I think they need to introduce a mid-tier pricing level between Free and Pro.

They've got a good foothold in the market as a all-in-one solution. I've attempted to find a drop-in replacement, without much luck. It's difficult to find a one-for-one service, but here's some similar services with entry-level pricing:

DataDog (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/): $15/host/month up to 100 hosts.

Scout (https://scoutapp.com/subscriptions): $10/host/month

CopperEgg (http://copperegg.com/pricing/): A la carte depending on service

Stackify (http://www.stackify.com/pricing/): $15/host/month

The biggest feature that I need is application level monitoring for PHP. There's plenty of great server monitoring tools, but not many services that track application performance like New Relic does.

I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?

Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative service.

> I agree, New Relic's pricing model is almost too "enterprise".

That was also my conclusion, if you look at the list of companies that uses them you will get a list of some very big businesses. And they can probably afford it, which is good for NewRelic.

> I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?

You could probably use their software, and build a collector for the data, but that doesn't really solve the issue of not building an alternative service.

Yehuda Katz have built Skylight (https://www.skylight.io/) for Ruby performance metrics and they do charge for the number of requests, the platform isn't there yet, but they are improving a lot. Their newsletters are a good read :-)

> Per host pricing seems high, and difficult to scale.

This is an understatement. $149/month/host is crazy if you're using anything other than the largest AWS instances, for example - a c3.large is $16.11/month with a reservation.

But New Relic isn't necessarily designed to be a tool to save you hosting $ (although I suppose it could). What about as a tool to save engineering hours, and increase conversion rates by reducing error rates and improving performance? Maybe the "worth it" changes then -- especially when you consider that we have a Lite product that's absolutely free for unlimited apps, servers, and request volume -- just limited to 24 hour data retention and missing some of our more advanced/in-depth features.

I work for New Relic, obviously :)

> What about as a tool to save engineering hours, and increase conversion rates by reducing error rates and improving performance?

The problem I have with that argument is that the number of hours New Relic saves me isn't really related to the number of instances I'm running. If I've got 10 AWS medium instances and I swap them out for 30 AWS micro instances, my NR cost just tripled but its utility to me likely didn't.

You just need to talk your account rep (or sales if you don't have one). You will definitely not pay this price. I work for New Relic, so if you need help, let me know.

I really don't like playing "what's the real price" games.

I hear you. It's just a matter of simplicity. We can't have every single environment configuration on the site. So, we have a few list prices with links to contact us if your model doesn't fit. I hope that helps. If you have other questions, let me know.

> Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative service.

AppNeta TraceView is an alternative to New Relic: http://www.appneta.com/products/traceview/

Disclosure: I work for AppNeta.

Getting out of my comfort zone here, as I feel we are not ready, but my company is working on a product that is focusing much more on application profiling than NewRelic and less on the monitoring that is built exclusively for PHP:

https://profiler.qafoolabs.com/

We are still in closed beta but not for long anymore. You can sign up for our waiting list if you are interested to hear more.

As for the pricing, we are working on a model that is not per server/host.

Their pricing models make even less sense when you’re using docker containers for deployments.

With that said, I’ve used their services for years and without question for my group the monitoring pays for itself in improved efficiency of developers and operations. Last year we moved from the free service to the enterprise service that gives us 12 app-servers (in our case 12 deployed Rails docker-Containers) for about $500 a month.

We have docker nodes that spin up and down frequently for one of the rails apps we use for monitoring and it can at times create what appears to be more instances than what we physically have.

Their free service I believe is good enough for many use cases, and you can monitor an unlimited number of hosts/services outside of the “application” monitoring. I looked at scout and a few other monitoring services, and as much as I like their pricing model, the product just doesn’t compare to new-relic.

If you write into support at New Relic (or email/call a sales rep that you have already worked with), we can get an account exec to chat with you about pricing more appropriate to your situation. We are aware that in a world of autoscaling and micropriced micronodes, a different pricing model is likely to be more appropriate.

You can see the first shot at a revision like this with the pricing restructure on heroku that we announced last december:

http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/12/04/new-relic-announces-new-...

Your complaint is totally reasonable and NR is hoping to address it soon!

Do you recommend any particular alternative to New Relic? In particular, I'd be interested in something that helps answer the questions "How much memory am I using, and what's using it?" New Relic helps a lot with the latter question, as it can aggregate request time by Rails action. E.g. it can say "30% of your Apache workers' time is spent in this one Rails action." Which helps you understand what's driving the need for more Apache workers, and thus the need for more memory.

Try https://ruxit.com, we are fresh out of beta (disclosure: I work on ruxit)

Supported technologies: https://ruxit.com/ruxit/supportedtechnologies.html

We have pretty cool technology to correlate events into bigger buckets (problems).It is based on tracking of each individual transaction flow through the stack plus discovery of infrastructure topology and performance.

[Edit:spelling ]

You probably just didn't talk to anyone. You will pay much less than that if you go with a bursting plan.