Save money and still do more in this downturn with New Relic

As I meet with developers, executives, and partners operating digital enterprises across the globe, one thing is clear-every engineering team is being asked to do more with less. Budgets are shrinking, headcount is going away, and in some cases, engineers are being let go. If you're in that situation, this blog can help.

This time reminds me of 2008-2010 when a similar economic downturn had businesses of all sizes wrestling with budgets and looking for efficiencies. Do you remember where you were, around that same time, when you first heard of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the cloud consumption model?

I remember I was sitting in a conference room listening to an AWS product manager describe how Amazon.com's large e-commerce presence had forced the company to provision enormous quantities of compute, network, and storage infrastructure to ensure enough capacity for peak retail seasons, only to see most of it sit idle for a majority of the year. For Amazon, this represented both a problem and an opportunity. How could they turn a huge capital expense into a business opportunity?

The answer was simple: turn that spare capacity into a pay-for-usage service where Windows and Linux hosts were available for rent by the hour. I was stunned. At the time I worked at Microsoft and knew that the dominant way to purchase Windows was through a host-based licensing model. So while all those Windows hosts were making Microsoft money, whether they were being used or not, they were costing customers. The new usage-based approach was an entirely different way to spin up machines on demand, enabling customers to pay only for what they use, when they need it. And with that simple idea, a multi-trillion-dollar industry was born, representing the largest disruptive force in technology for the past decade.

It's a bit ironic then, as we sit here in 2023 amidst the most significant uncertain economic period we've experienced in a decade, that the majority of observability vendors are still stuck charging customers by the host-in fact, some charge at peak host count for the entire month, even if you scale up for just one day! Even Azure doesn't charge for Windows that way anymore.

We know the host-based pricing model well. We led the application performance monitoring (APM) market with it for more than a decade. But we listened to our customers, studied the industry, and knew it was time to introduce a better way.

Our all-in-one platform pricing model-which is based on two core metrics, users and GBs, instead of hosts-isn't just a different way to price, it's better. It delivers more value per dollar.

Are you tired of surprise bills and ballooning observability costs?

We've seen many teams consolidating their Datadog, Elastic, Sumo, and open-source monitoring tools to New Relic and saving money because of five key factors:

1. No peak billing : Pay for actual usage, avoid peak usage billing when environments scale up.
2. No penalties: Predictably forecast spend and avoid overages for specific data types like custom metrics.
3. Low infra monitoring cost: Get 3x+ more value than host-based pricing vendors like Datadog.
4. Low log management cost< /a>: Get 2-4x more value than Sumo Logic and 2-3x more value than Elastic.
5. Low overall total cost of ownership (TCO) : Get 5x+ more value than Datadog as you consolidate all observability needs in one platform.

Let me explain them one by one.

Most customers now scale their infrastructure based on customer traffic. Observability vendors with legacy host-based pricing models (like Datadog, Elastic, and Splunk) price by high watermark (peak) usage instead of actual usage.

For example, Datadog prices per host at the 99% highest usage hour for the month.¹ As shown in the chart below and the underlying spreadsheet, a representative customer's monthly bill is 44% higher than the commitment as the environment scales up with customer traffic. In the same period, the New Relic bill is 2x less expensive than the commitment and 3x+ less expensive than the actual bill because New Relic charges for actual usage at a single low price per GB.

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