As a leader in observability and application performance monitoring (APM), New Relic empowers engineers with a data-driven approach to planning, building, deploying, and running great software.
Last month, we announced support for New Relic on the CloudZero platform. With this new functionality, customers can gain visibility into their New Relic spend, combine it with any other IT or infrastructure spend, and achieve a complete view of business dimensions — such as products and customers.
In this blog, we give an overview of all things New Relic: why the New Relic observability platform is innovative, the unique attributes of APM billing, and how our platform provides spend context for New Relic customers.
Observability Is Essential
High-performing and resilient applications are no longer “nice-to-haves” when it comes to operating a modern business — which is why APM tools have become table stakes in any software tool chain. Companies simply can’t afford to let their platforms go down or let credit card transactions stall without their knowledge.
New Relic is one of the most popular companies out there helping organizations prevent software disasters, while continuously improving performance.
Usage Based Pricing: Pay For Only What You Need
New Relic offers usage-based pricing, which bills based on data ingested and number of billable users. This model is simple and easy to understand.
As DevOps teams use the platform, they make decisions about which data streams they need and how often they need them. New Relic’s usage-based pricing model only charges customers for what they use.
With all this in mind, there are a few things to consider.
APM spend impacts SaaS COGS
Because APM tools are a key aspect of running software, for SaaS companies, they impact the cost of goods sold (COGS).
COGS is a key part of calculating gross margin, which in turn, impacts metrics like share prices and valuation. SaaS companies are constantly trying to keep their COGS in check to maximize margin, so visibility is important to ensure costs stay in healthy alignment with revenue.
Technical teams need business context
If you’re in charge of building dashboards for maximum visibility, you’re probably going to take a “the more visibility the better” approach.
However, when every gigabyte of data has a cost associated with it, it’s important to ensure teams have business context to confirm any spend is fueling the right priorities.
Align cost to business dimensions
Businesses make better decisions when they have the right data. Instead of viewing the total cost of a software provider like New Relic, aligning the bill to business dimensions can help organizations more completely understand their cost to operate.
For example, if New Relic is monitoring an application, you may want to consider combining the total cost to run the app on the cloud with the cost to monitor it. This provides a more holistic picture to base decisions on.
CloudZero Adds A Layer Of Context To New Relic Billing
CloudZero recently developed support for New Relic billing data, which enables customers to unify New Relic spend with the rest of their cloud spend. In addition to automating the process of ingesting and analyzing their New Relic bill, this gives customers:
- Total cost. CloudZero shows the complete cost to run New Relic, combining it with other cost sources (such as AWS) into a single view of cost per business dimension (e.g., team, product feature, application).
- Exploration and flexibility. CloudZero doesn’t just let you build charts and reports — it makes your cost data interactive. Drill down, explore, and understand exactly how your cost connects to different aspects of your business.
- Guardrails. We provide up-to-the-minute cost data, anomaly alerts, and trend summaries that help engineering and DevOps teams move fast without overspending.
All of which means you can innovate with the confidence that you’re staying inbounds, costwise. No more leaving unused resources on, no more manually connecting spend to products, no more labor-intensive ad-hoc spend exploration projects.
Curious to see how CloudZero does it? 
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