AppNeta TraceView is an alternative to New Relic: http://www.appneta.com/products/traceview/
Disclosure: I work for AppNeta.
That was also my conclusion, if you look at the list of companies that uses them you will get a list of some very big businesses. And they can probably afford it, which is good for NewRelic.
> I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?
You could probably use their software, and build a collector for the data, but that doesn't really solve the issue of not building an alternative service.
Yehuda Katz have built Skylight (https://www.skylight.io/) for Ruby performance metrics and they do charge for the number of requests, the platform isn't there yet, but they are improving a lot. Their newsletters are a good read :-)
This is an understatement. $149/month/host is crazy if you're using anything other than the largest AWS instances, for example - a c3.large is $16.11/month with a reservation.
I work for New Relic, obviously :)
The problem I have with that argument is that the number of hours New Relic saves me isn't really related to the number of instances I'm running. If I've got 10 AWS medium instances and I swap them out for 30 AWS micro instances, my NR cost just tripled but its utility to me likely didn't.
https://profiler.qafoolabs.com/
We are still in closed beta but not for long anymore. You can sign up for our waiting list if you are interested to hear more.
As for the pricing, we are working on a model that is not per server/host.
They've got a good foothold in the market as a all-in-one solution. I've attempted to find a drop-in replacement, without much luck. It's difficult to find a one-for-one service, but here's some similar services with entry-level pricing:
DataDog (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/): $15/host/month up to 100 hosts.
Scout (https://scoutapp.com/subscriptions): $10/host/month
CopperEgg (http://copperegg.com/pricing/): A la carte depending on service
Stackify (http://www.stackify.com/pricing/): $15/host/month
The biggest feature that I need is application level monitoring for PHP. There's plenty of great server monitoring tools, but not many services that track application performance like New Relic does.
I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?
Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative service.