Start with New Relic free tier (100GB/month, 1 full-platform user)
New Relic's free tier is the most generous in the category — 100GB/month of data ingestion with full platform access. Enough to monitor a small production environment. Upgrade to paid when you need more than 1 full-platform user or exceed the free data allowance.
- Recommendation: New Relic, Grafana Cloud
Recommended starting points
Based on your constraints, these products typically fit best. Read each decision brief to confirm pricing behavior and limits match your reality.
New Relic
Full-stack observability with consumption-based pricing ($0.30/GB after 100GB free/month). Covers APM, infrastructure, logs, and browser monitoring. The most generous free tier in the category.
Grafana Cloud
Managed observability on open-source foundations (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo). Metrics via PromQL, logs via LogQL, traces via TraceQL. Free tier: 10K active series, 50GB logs/month.
Why this recommendation
New Relic's free tier is the most generous in the category — 100GB/month of data ingestion with full platform access. Enough to monitor a small production environment. Upgrade to paid when you need more than 1 full-platform user or exceed the free data allowance.