New Relic Costly Mistakes: Are You Overspending?

Common New Relic Mistakes to Avoid

Effectively monitoring your applications and infrastructure is essential in 2026. New Relic, a powerful observability platform, offers a wealth of features to achieve this. However, many users, even seasoned engineers, fall into common pitfalls that hinder its full potential. Are you truly maximizing your investment in this technology, or are you leaving valuable insights on the table?

1. Neglecting Attribute Filtering

One of the most frequent errors I see is the failure to properly configure attribute filtering. New Relic collects a vast amount of data, and if you’re not careful, you can end up ingesting a lot of noise. This not only increases your costs but also makes it harder to find the signals that truly matter. We had a client last year who was paying almost double what they should have been because they weren’t filtering out irrelevant attributes.

Common Mistake: Leaving all attributes enabled by default.

How to Fix It:

1. Go to your New Relic account settings.
2. Navigate to “Data Management” and then “Attribute Filtering Rules.”
3. Review the list of attributes being collected.
4. For attributes that are not essential for your monitoring needs, select “Drop attribute.”
5. Pay close attention to attributes with high cardinality (i.e., many unique values), as these can significantly impact your data ingestion volume.

Pro Tip: Start with a conservative approach and only enable attributes that you know you need. You can always add more later if necessary. You can boost speed and cut costs, too, if you optimize effectively. Use the New Relic Data Ingest API to get a handle on how much data you’re sending.

2. Ignoring Custom Dashboards

New Relic provides a set of default dashboards, which can be helpful for getting started. However, relying solely on these dashboards is a missed opportunity. Every application and infrastructure setup is unique, and your monitoring needs will likely differ from the defaults. Custom dashboards allow you to visualize the specific KPIs that are most relevant to your business.

Common Mistake: Sticking with the default dashboards without any customization.

How to Fix It:

1. In New Relic, click on “Dashboards” in the left-hand navigation.
2. Click the “+ Create Dashboard” button.
3. Give your dashboard a meaningful name (e.g., “E-commerce Checkout Performance”).
4. Add charts and widgets that display the KPIs you want to track. Consider metrics like response time, error rate, throughput, and resource utilization.
5. Use NRQL (New Relic Query Language) to create custom queries that extract the specific data you need. For example, you can use NRQL to calculate the average order value or the number of new users per day.

Pro Tip: Collaborate with your team to identify the most important KPIs for your application. Share your dashboards with others to ensure that everyone is on the same page. I’ve found that presenting dashboards to the product team in weekly sprint reviews can be a great way to keep performance top of mind. Here’s what nobody tells you: you’ll need to iterate on your dashboards frequently. Don’t be afraid to tweak them as your needs evolve.

3. Forgetting Proactive Alerting

Monitoring is only useful if you take action based on the data you collect. Setting up proactive alerting is crucial for identifying and resolving issues before they impact your users. Many users rely on manual monitoring, which is time-consuming and prone to errors. Anomaly detection, a key feature of New Relic, can help you automate this process.

Common Mistake: Relying solely on manual monitoring and not setting up proactive alerts.

How to Fix It:

1. In New Relic, go to “Alerts & AI” in the left-hand navigation.
2. Click the “+ Create a Policy” button.
3. Define the conditions that should trigger an alert. Use anomaly detection to automatically identify unusual behavior.
4. Configure the notification channels to use when an alert is triggered. Options include email, Slack, PagerDuty, and webhooks.
5. Set up different alert levels (e.g., warning, critical) based on the severity of the issue.

Pro Tip: Start with a small set of critical alerts and gradually expand your coverage as you gain experience. Avoid creating too many alerts, as this can lead to alert fatigue. We had a situation where a team was getting so many alerts they started ignoring them. Guess what happened next? A major outage. Don’t let that be you.

4. Not Integrating with Other Tools

New Relic is a powerful platform on its own, but it becomes even more valuable when integrated with other tools in your ecosystem. Integration with tools like Slack or PagerDuty can streamline your incident response process and improve collaboration among team members. You might even consider integrating with a tool that can help you handle tech project failures before they happen.

Common Mistake: Using New Relic in isolation and not integrating it with other tools.

How to Fix It:

1. Explore the available integrations in the New Relic marketplace.
2. Configure integrations with the tools that your team uses for communication, incident management, and automation.
3. Use webhooks to send data from New Relic to other systems.
4. For Slack, configure New Relic to send alert notifications to specific channels.
5. For PagerDuty, set up rules to automatically create incidents based on New Relic alerts.

Pro Tip: Use webhooks to send data from New Relic to your internal systems for custom analysis and reporting. This can be particularly useful for tracking key business metrics and identifying trends. Consider using Zapier if you don’t want to code your own webhook integrations.

5. Overlooking New Relic’s APM Features

New Relic’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) features are incredibly powerful, but many users only scratch the surface. Understanding how to effectively use these features can significantly improve your ability to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.

Common Mistake: Only using basic APM features and not diving deeper into transaction traces, database monitoring, and service maps.

How to Fix It:

1. Regularly review transaction traces to identify slow-performing code.
2. Use database monitoring to identify slow queries and optimize your database performance.
3. Leverage service maps to visualize the dependencies between your services and identify potential points of failure.
4. Use distributed tracing to track requests across multiple services.
5. Pay close attention to the “Errors” tab in New Relic APM to identify and resolve application errors.

Pro Tip: Use the New Relic agent API to add custom instrumentation to your code. This allows you to track specific metrics and events that are relevant to your application. This can be especially helpful for identifying performance issues in custom code. A recent case study involved a large e-commerce company based here in Atlanta, near the intersection of Peachtree and Lenox. They were struggling with slow checkout times during peak hours. After implementing custom instrumentation using the New Relic agent API, they were able to pinpoint a specific function that was causing the bottleneck. Optimizing this function resulted in a 30% reduction in checkout time and a significant increase in sales. They used the `newrelic_custom_metric` function (they were using PHP). If you find slow code, don’t forget profiling beats tweaking.

By avoiding these common mistakes, you can unlock the full potential of New Relic and gain valuable insights into the performance of your applications and infrastructure. Don’t just monitor – observe and act.

Don’t let your New Relic implementation be just another dashboard. Take the time to properly configure it, create custom dashboards, and set up proactive alerting. Only then can you truly unlock the power of this technology and gain the insights you need to improve the performance and reliability of your applications. Start today by reviewing your attribute filtering rules – you might be surprised at how much wasted data you’re ingesting.