New Relic recently announced another pricing model change, and dropped the bomb, literally. This time, they are attempting to take their “shelf-ware” model of pricing, and move into the modern world of consumption based pricing. Although very limited public information is available, there is another, “Swing and a Miss” approach on this pricing model update. They have publicly announced 3 areas that impact pricing. I will restate here, pricing is closely based on Per-Seat-User (FULL Users) , Data Collected, and Applied Intelligence.
The Per-Seat-User for broad adoption is a deal killer, IMHO. For enterprise accounts, I am strongly suggesting, just say NO, and push back on New Relic. The goals of observability need to include wide adoption; this includes growing users accounts. New Relic counters this cost with the addition of a Basic User with limited capability for Free. Set up your standard practice with all users as Basic, and only promote your power users to Full capacity.
The Data Collection, although retention details are MIA (Missing In Action), appears to be be very good pricing on stored data. That is, data you intend to send to the platform. Upon a dive into what data is sent, it is a bit of mystery as they control the data from their own agents and services. I am currently challenging them on what’s in their payload as measured… SHOW ME… how data is wrapped up.
The Applied intelligence pricing is not well understood at all. Some combination of events, alerts and AI??
New customers may find it palatable to engage on this new model. That said, larger enterprise customers are going to need to reexamine this cost impact of broad adoption and what that means verses a wholesale swap out with another solution provider.
I forecast this change is a good move for New Relic, however there are gaps that may cause existing customers to abandon them.
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