groundcover vs. New Relic

Compare groundcover vs. New Relic for Observability. We want you to choose the most suitable tool for your use case, even if it’s not us.

As cloud-native environments continue to grow in complexity, observability has become essential for ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of modern applications. From monitoring infrastructure health, enabling deep visibility into distributed systems, or getting real-time insights into reasoning paths, token usage of LLM Agentic applications. However, traditional vendors sliced visibility into separate products (APM, Log Management, Infrastructure Monitoring, LLM Observability) and priced them in ways that forced tradeoffs making it important for team to choosing the right observability platform is critical to operational success.

groundcover and New Relic each bring unique strengths to observability, with distinct capabilities and trade-offs. The best fit depends on your organization’s priorities—whether that’s cost efficiency, deployment flexibility, developer experience, or ecosystem integrations.

The right choice depends on your priorities: cost, control, scale, and flexibility. In the following sections, we’ll compare both platforms to help you determine which best fits your needs, even if the answer isn’t us.

groundcover vs. New Relic at a glance

groundcover
New Relic
BYOC (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
On Prem (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
Correlation between logs, metrics, traces
Kubernetes native
Full HTTP Payloads of Request as well as response including headers
Smart Sampling

groundcover vs. New Relic at a glance

groundcover
New Relic
RBAC for user roles
RBAC for Pages
RBAC for Actions
Fine-grain access control to data/resources (namespace setup support) to provide access to specific teams or by data type (MELT)

groundcover vs. New Relic at a glance

groundcover
New Relic
All data types included in standard plan
APM, Logs, LLM, RUM, Infrastructure Monitoring all sold separately
No Ingestion based pricing
No ingestion based fees (ingestion depends on own storage)
Additional costs based on retention
No retention pricing. Keep as much as you want
Costs increase when retention policies applied
Additional costs for indexed data
All data is indexed at no additional costs
Additional price bands for hot/cold storage
Out of the box LLM Observability (tokens, hallucinations, drift)
No Additional Cost
(Manual instrumentation is possible and charges will apply)
RUM
No Additional Cost
(Usage based)

groundcover overview

groundcover is a full-stack observability platform that goes beyond traditional SaaS limitations by giving teams complete control of their telemetry in their own cloud. It delivers APM, log management, infrastructure monitoring, LLM observability, and Real User Monitoring (RUM) in a single, unified solution — all with zero instrumentation, powered by eBPF.

With a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) model, groundcover eliminates SaaS markups and data tradeoffs, providing complete visibility, infinite retention, and flat, predictable pricing. From infrastructure to applications to Agentic Application workloads, groundcover captures every signal — without sampling or rate limits — and keeps it private and secure inside your VPC. Whether running in the cloud, on-prem, or in regulated environments, groundcover gives engineering teams operational simplicity, cost clarity, and observability that just works, without compromise.

New Relic overview

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that collects and analyzes telemetry data — including metrics, events, logs, and traces — across applications and infrastructure. It provides a full-stack view of digital systems with capabilities such as application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and customizable dashboards. The platform uses a single data model to unify telemetry, helping teams identify performance bottlenecks, trace dependencies, and resolve issues faster. New Relic also incorporates AI-driven insights for anomaly detection and predictive analysis, and supports real-time alerts to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). Its usage-based pricing model allows organizations to pay for the data they ingest, rather than committing to fixed tiers. New Relic is used by engineering teams to monitor application health, troubleshoot issues, and align observability data with business and operational outcomes.

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