The Howdy Glossary

New Relic is an observability platform that assists digital businesses in enhancing customer experience and performance by offering a spectrum of monitoring tools. These include application performance, infrastructure, synthetic monitoring, and real user monitoring. It tracks transactions through the entire technology stack—from user interfaces to backend services and databases—delivering end-to-end visibility. The platform also utilizes machine learning for predictive insights and features customizable dashboards for visualizations and alerts based on collected metrics.

Founded by Lew Cirne in 2008, New Relic emerged from Cirne's previous work on the web application performance tool "Rubicon." Under his leadership, the company has become a significant entity in the observability space, serving numerous digital organizations with extensive monitoring solutions. New Relic was designed to empower digital businesses with comprehensive tools for system monitoring, analysis, and real-time improvements to optimize customer experiences and system performances.

New Relic distinguishes itself from competitors such as Splunk, Datadog, and Dynatrace through its emphasis on end-to-end visibility across entire technology stacks. This includes tracking transactions from user interfaces down to backend services and databases. Its unique features also include machine learning capabilities for predictive insights that allow proactive issue resolution and highly customizable dashboards for tailored visualizations. Together these elements enable a personalized yet comprehensive approach to system optimization that supports software developers, IT operations teams, DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and business stakeholders in maintaining reliable operations within dynamic digital landscapes.