Live data from Hacker News

New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

thenewstack.io

11–20 of 40 posts

Re: New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

#11
> 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?

Re: New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

#12

> 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 c…

shrinking profits

Re: New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

#13
post #7

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

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

Re: New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

#14
post #9

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 infrastructu…

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.

Re: New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

#16
post #12

> 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 c…

shrinking profits

They did have some layoffs recently.

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2020/07/new-relic-...

Re: New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

#18
post #9

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 infrastructu…

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.

Re: New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

#19
post #9

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 infrastructu…

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.

Re: New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation

#20
post #15

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...

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)

Post reply on HN