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

#1

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

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

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

#2

Post by pwarner » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

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.

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

#3

Post by blaisio » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

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.

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

#4

Post by tnisonoff » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

pwarner wrote: post #2

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.

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

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

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

#5

Post by kawsper » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

blaisio wrote: post #3

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.

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

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

#6

Post by dariusj18 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

kawsper wrote: post #5

blaisio wrote: post #3

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.

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

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.

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

#7

Post by mrweasel » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

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

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

#8

Post by didip » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

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

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

#9

Post by bearjaws » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

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 :(

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

#10

Post by roncohen » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: 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

Maybe Elastic APM fits your need? It works well on-prem as well as on the Elastic hosted offering and you can get started for free.

Disclosure: I work for Elastic