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.

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 [2] https://prometheus.io [3] https://grafana.com [4] https://github.com/NickCraver/StackExchange.Exceptional

You may want to try site24x7.com. Similar offering to what newrelic, datadog and the likes give in APM and infrastructure monitoring space with lower costs yet comparable to the feature sets offered.

Disclaimer: I work here.

We had a call with them this week. Basically you pay a flat fee for a pool of traffic / resources. No longer billed by instances.

Came here to share this - NR just redid their entire pricing structure, in my opinion it's now a much better approach for horizontal scaling.

Most everything is now part of a single product: New Relic One. You pay for data ingest beyond the first 100GB and you pay per seat for seats after the first. The AI pieces have some additional costs after a certain point as well, but from my understanding the free tier is very generous.

source: Worked at NR 5yrs ago for several years on an agent team (frequently lamented pricing structure), joined again about a month ago.

I've long preferred New Relic as well - it always seemed the most natural to use; the information that was important was easy to find. Some other APM's didn't even seem to be recording accurate metrics, but ones that did were still more difficult to navigate.

I've also had some issues with New Relic - constant problems with metric names exploding. Individual unique urls that saw especially high traffic routinely ended up getting their own unique metric name until new metric name creation would get locked. This would be despite us explicitly naming requests through the sdk.

All that said, the biggest reason I still use them is because we're still on some ancient pricing that's a fraction of their current (up until now) pricing. Our rep's been bugging me to get on a call about "renewal" but if our price is going to go up 5-10x I'm moving.

YUP ran into the exact same thing.

"Well you learn things from development environments." Yes I know, but I'm paying a pretty penny to monitor production environments, and other places give development licenses for free.