New Relic API
New Relic NerdGraph GraphQL API and REST API — full-stack observability platform APIs for querying APM metrics, infrastructure data, logs, traces, and alerts, enabling agents to automate observability workflows and incident response.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
SOC2 Type II, ISO27001, HIPAA BAA, FedRAMP High. GDPR with EU data residency option. Separate ingest vs query keys is good security design. User key scoped to account permissions. Enterprise-grade compliance posture.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You're already using New Relic for full-stack observability and need agents to query NRQL, manage alerts, and correlate performance data across APM, infrastructure, and logs.
Avoid When
You need cost-efficient open-source observability — Prometheus + Grafana + Loki provide similar capabilities at lower cost for self-managed infrastructure.
Use Cases
- • Agents querying New Relic NRQL for application performance metrics to power custom dashboards and anomaly detection
- • Incident automation — agents reading New Relic alert violations and enriching incidents with context from APM traces
- • SLO monitoring — agents tracking New Relic service level objectives and triggering workflows when error budgets burn fast
- • Deployment correlation — agents marking deployment events in New Relic and correlating with subsequent performance changes
- • Capacity planning — agents querying New Relic infrastructure data to identify under/over-provisioned resources
Not For
- • Teams on tight budgets — New Relic's full-stack pricing can be significant at scale; use Grafana+Prometheus for cost-efficient monitoring
- • Simple uptime monitoring only — Better Stack or Uptime Robot are simpler for basic uptime checks
- • Security monitoring — use Datadog Security or Elastic SIEM; New Relic focuses on performance observability
Interface
Authentication
User keys (personal) or License keys (ingest-only). User keys for NerdGraph API and REST API queries. License keys for data ingestion (metrics, events, logs). Ingest keys cannot query. User keys scoped to account permissions.
Pricing
Data ingest-based pricing is predictable. Full users (with query access) are expensive. Basic users are free but limited. Generous free tier for development and small deployments.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ User keys vs License keys are different — ingest-only License keys cannot query NRQL; always use User key for queries
- ⚠ NerdGraph is GraphQL — agents must construct valid GraphQL with NRQL embedded as strings within mutations
- ⚠ Account ID required in most queries — agents must pre-fetch and store Account ID for all API operations
- ⚠ NRQL queries have a 60-second timeout — complex queries over large time ranges need optimization or narrower time windows
- ⚠ Multi-account organizations require cross-account query syntax — agents must handle account hierarchy for enterprise deployments
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for New Relic API.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.