Who New Relic is
New Relic, Inc. was founded by Lew Cirne in 2008 and is headquartered in San Francisco. It has been privately owned since November 2023, when the investment firms Francisco Partners and TPG completed their purchase of it. Its observability platform brings application performance monitoring (APM), mobile, browser and infrastructure monitoring, logs and distributed tracing together, with all of the data in one place.
Its Flutter agent, newrelic_mobile, is published and maintained by New Relic itself and works through the company's native iOS and Android agents to report Dart errors, native crashes, HTTP requests and interactions. On the server side, its APM agents cover Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Go, Ruby and PHP, and distributed tracing links a request made in an app to the work the servers did for it. That view of one request, from the phone to the platform, is why it is one of the crash, error and performance monitoring tools our analytics and monitoring module connects to.
What it does in your platform
Analytics & monitoring
Watches your mobile apps, web apps and servers for crashes, errors and slow requests. A crash or error from an app arrives with its stack trace, the device and OS version, and the app version and build, and distributed tracing follows a request from the app into the services and database queries behind it, so engineers can tell which side a problem is on. Customers appear only under the random platform ID, and personal data is kept out of every report before it is sent.
How the connection works
The apps use New Relic's own Flutter agent, newrelic_mobile, which runs New Relic's native iOS and Android agents underneath. The servers report through New Relic's APM agents for their languages and the web apps through its browser agent, and the trace headers added to each request join the two sides into one distributed trace.
A new version is built
Each build's version number is reported with every event as the app version. The iOS build uploads its dSYM files and the Android build its mapping file to New Relic, so native crash reports show real method names instead of addresses or obfuscated labels. The .symbols files Flutter writes for obfuscated Dart code are kept with the release, and engineers load them in Errors Inbox, which symbolicates a Dart stack trace in the browser.
The app starts New Relic
When the app opens, the module starts New Relic's agent, or waits until the customer agrees if your data protection officer decides that monitoring needs consent too. The agent receives the customer's random platform ID, never a name, email address or phone number, and two options that could carry personal data stay off: the bodies of failed responses and the app's print output.
A transfer is traced
The customer sends money. The agent records the request to the platform's API with its status code, response time and size, strips the query string from the URL, and adds trace headers. The APM agent on the server continues the trace through each service and database query, so engineers can see where a slow or failed transfer spent its time.
Something breaks
On the confirmation screen, the app throws a Dart error. The module's error handler strips personal data from it and hands it to the agent with its stack trace, and the agent adds the device, the OS version and the app version. A native crash is caught by the iOS or Android agent itself, with the trail of interactions and requests that led up to it. If the phone is offline, the report waits on the device and is sent later.
Engineers are alerted
Errors Inbox puts errors with the same fingerprint into one error group, so the same failure from every phone becomes one entry, next to the errors from the server and the web apps. It shows the crash rate, the share of crash-free users and how many devices were affected, and New Relic notifies your engineers in Slack, by email or with a new Jira issue.
The fix is confirmed
Engineers mark the error group as resolved in the version that carries the fix. If the error comes back in that version or a later one, New Relic reopens the group and tags it as a regression, and the crash-free users chart shows whether the new release is healthier.
Next to other providers
In the module's crash, error and performance monitoring group, New Relic sits with Sentry, Firebase Crashlytics, Datadog and BugSnag. Product analytics tools such as Mixpanel, Amplitude and Google Analytics for Firebase answer what customers do; New Relic answers how quickly and reliably the apps and servers responded while they did it. All of them know a customer by the same random platform ID, so engineers can find one customer's failed transfer in New Relic by that ID alone.
Because the apps and servers talk to New Relic through the module's one interface, your platform decides the customer ID, the version names and which fields a report may contain. Choosing another monitoring tool later means a new connector in the next release of the apps and servers, and nothing changes in your screens or features.
When New Relic fits best
A strong fit when
- You want crashes, errors and slow requests from your apps, web apps and servers in one place, linked by distributed tracing.
- Your servers already report to New Relic, and you want the apps next to them.
- You want monitoring data stored in the EU, with a provider that holds an ISO 27001 certificate, a SOC 2 Type 2 report and a PCI DSS attestation.
Also worth a look
- Sentry, when error tracking per release comes first and you want server-side scrubbing on by default.
- Datadog, when your servers already report to it, or a monitoring tool your team already runs, which becomes one more connector.
How we get you live
The contract
We help you get your New Relic account and contract in place, with New Relic's Data Processing Addendum, which incorporates the EU Standard Contractual Clauses for personal data that leaves the EU.
The data
We create your New Relic organisation in the EU region. The region is chosen when the organisation is created, and New Relic does not move an account's data to another region later. What a report may carry goes on the tracking plan your team reviews, the apps send neither the bodies of failed responses nor their print output, and the server agents keep their default of recording no request parameters.
The keys
The apps carry only keys New Relic issues for sending data: a mobile app token for each app, one for iOS and one for Android, and a browser key in the web apps. The servers' ingest key, and the user keys that query data or change settings, stay in your platform's secrets and never ship in an app.
A full test run
A separate New Relic account receives deliberate crashes, errors and slow requests from every app and server first, the agent's own test crash among them. We check that stack traces are readable, that traces join each app to the servers and that no personal data gets through, before your first real customer.
