Application and DevOps monitoring provider New Relic Inc. said today it’s repackaging its main product suite into just three categories and introducing a more simplified pricing model that should lead to lower costs for its customers.

It’s also adding a free pricing tier for software engineers to test its software. New Relic One is the company’s main “observability platform,” which is used to detect problems with software applications. It’s basically a performance monitoring service for applications that works in real-time, used by DevOps teams to gain a full understanding of any performance issues their apps might experience.

Under New Relic’s older pricing model, customers typically had to pay a fee for each application instance they monitored. But the company said it was worried that this could cause some customers to limit which apps they choose to monitor, especially during busy times, in order to keep their costs down.

The newer pricing model is meant to address that. Instead of paying to monitor each app, customers will now pay by the user, with a smaller, less expensive data component. The company said that should make New Relic easier for its customers to consume.

“From the beginning, New Relic has been focused on delivering a simple, yet powerful way to help every company and every engineer deliver more perfect software,” New Relic Chief Executive and Founder Lew Cirne (pictured) said in a statement. “Every engineer deserves the benefits of observability. That’s why we’re taking a bold step in dramatically simplifying and reducing the total cost of instrumenting everything across their environment.”

Cirne elaborated on the new pricing structure in an interview with TechCrunch, saying that the company has exposed the underlying telemetry database it uses to run its own products. He explained that using this database to track customer’s app monitoring, tracing and metric data in a single place, it’s better able to control its costs and can pass those savings onto its customers. He said most customers should see smaller bills based on the new pricing model.

New Relic is also simplifying its product suite in order to encourage customers to instrument all of their applications, rather than leaving some out in order to control costs.

The new, simplified New Relic One is made up of three products, including a Telemetry Data Platform that provides a single interface for gathering event, log and trace data from applications via agents or other open-source monitoring tools such as Prometheus.

Next is Full-Stack Observability, which is made up of a bunch of products that were previously sold separately, including the company’s APM, infrastructure, logging and mobility tools. The third product is Applied Intelligence, a recently introduced and now rebranded offering that uses artificial intelligence to help DevOps teams detect, diagnose and resolve any software incidents before they occur.

“New Relic is changing the economics of observability by empowering companies to leverage all available telemetry at dramatically lower cost than before,” Intellyx analyst Jason Bloomberg said in the press release. “For companies that leverage modern IT infrastructure, correlating all available performance data with the performance of their business has become mission critical. New Relic is removing the barriers to deploying essential observability across a company’s entire production environment.”

New Relic said its revamped platform is available now, with the Telemetry Data Platform priced at 25 cents per gigabyte of data ingested. Full-Stack Observability is priced on a per-user basis, while Applied Intelligence is priced on a per-transaction or per-event basis.

Photo: SiliconANGLE