# How to Vibe Code Your Own New Relic (and Stop Paying for It)

> AI-powered Observability

- Site: https://newrelic.com
- Category: Developer Tools
- Verdict: **Don't bother** (15/100 vibecodeable)
- Estimated effort: 6+ months of full-time work

## Verdict

Keep paying for New Relic or use open-source alternatives like Grafana and Prometheus; vibecoding a personal clone is a massive engineering trap due to the sheer complexity of distributed ingestion pipelines, agents, and time-series storage.

New Relic is an enterprise-grade distributed telemetry platform backed by nearly two decades of engineering and billions of dollars in infrastructure. While you can easily prompt a simple web dashboard that charts hardcoded metrics or processes a handful of JSON log files, building a true personal APM clone requires writing multi-language instrumentation agents, high-throughput streaming ingestion proxies, and columnar time-series storage that won't fall over when a single service throws a tantrum. The AI coding agent will effortlessly scaffold the Next.js UI, but it will completely break down when forced to implement a resilient OpenTelemetry ingestion pipeline and sub-second query engine from scratch.

### What you can't replicate

- Global-scale multi-tenant stream ingestion and buffering architecture
- 800+ production-tested telemetry collection agents across Java, .NET, Node, Python, and Go
- Enterprise compliance infrastructure including FedRAMP and HIPAA certs

## What it does

Comprehensive cloud observability and application performance monitoring platform for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing telemetry data across the stack.

### Core features

- Telemetry ingestion pipeline (metrics, logs, traces)
- APM service dependency mapping and transaction tracing
- Interactive query dashboards and log management
- Error tracking and risks inbox
- Synthetic transaction monitoring and checks
- AI-assisted log and performance analysis

## The business

### Pricing

- Free Tier: Free
- Standard Edition: $49/mo+
- Pro Edition: $349/user/mo

### Funding

$196M raised.
- Series A
- Series B
- Series C
- Series D
- IPO (2014)
- Acquired by Francisco Partners & TPG ($6.5B, 2023)
Investors: Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Dragoneer

Founded 2008.
Team size: 2,400 - 2,600+.

## The hard parts

- Massive high-throughput ingestion proxy handling concurrent telemetry streams without drops
- Time-series and columnar storage capable of sub-second federated queries over millions of spans/logs
- Writing lightweight, non-invasive profiling agents across multiple target runtime languages
- Real-time anomaly detection and dynamic threshold alerting engines

## How to vibe code New Relic

### Prerequisites

- Node.js (free): Required for running the Next.js frontend and dashboard application.
- GitHub (free): Repository hosting for version control and CI/CD deployment pipelines.

### Recommended AI tools

- Claude Code: Best-in-class agentic coding tool for scaffolding complex multi-file TypeScript applications and database schemas.
- Cursor: Ideal for iterative UI design, tweaking dashboard charts, and reviewing code diffs visually.

### Stack

- Frontend: Next.js
- Backend: Next.js API Routes
- Database: ClickHouse
- Auth: better-auth
- Payments: Stripe
- Other: Vercel AI SDK, Tailwind CSS, OpenTelemetry

### Hosting

- Fly.io (Hosting the ClickHouse telemetry database and ingestion webhook receiver): $10/mo
- Vercel (Hosting the Next.js observability dashboard and UI portal): $0-20/mo

### Build guide

1. **Project Scaffolding & Database Schema** — Initialize the Next.js project with Tailwind CSS and configure the ClickHouse database connection for storing high-volume telemetry events, logs, and spans.

```
Create a new Next.js project using App Router, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. Setup a database client configuration file to connect to a ClickHouse instance via HTTP. Define the core TypeScript interfaces and database schemas for 'metrics', 'logs', and 'traces' tables. Ensure schemas include timestamp, service_name, trace_id, span_id, log_level, and JSON attributes. Add an initial database migration script that creates these tables with appropriate columnar indexes and partitions by day.
```

2. **Authentication & User Management** — Implement local authentication for the personal dashboard using better-auth.

```
Integrate better-auth into the Next.js application. Configure email/password authentication backed by ClickHouse or a lightweight SQLite database for user sessions. Create login, signup, and account settings pages using Tailwind CSS. Protect dashboard routes with middleware that checks for a valid user session, redirecting unauthenticated users to the sign-in screen.
```

3. **Telemetry Ingestion API Endpoint** — Build high-throughput HTTP ingestion endpoints compatible with OpenTelemetry protocols to receive metrics, logs, and traces from target applications.

```
Build a secure ingestion API route in Next.js at /api/v1/telemetry that accepts batch JSON payloads containing logs, metrics, and traces. Validate the incoming payload structure, parse metadata, and bulk-insert records directly into the ClickHouse tables. Implement rate limiting and basic API key authentication headers so only authorized agent scripts can send telemetry data. Add error handling and response logging for failed batches.
```

4. **Dashboard Overview & Service Map UI** — Create the main observability dashboard showing system health, error rates, throughput, and service dependency relationships.

```
Develop the main dashboard UI page at /dashboard using Tailwind CSS and Lucide React icons. Create modular dashboard widgets including an APM throughput line chart, an error rate counter card, and a service dependency list derived from trace data queries. Build interactive time-range selector filters (last 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days) that update the API query parameters and refresh the charts dynamically.
```

5. **Logs Explorer & Error Inbox** — Implement a searchable log explorer interface and a unified error inbox for tracking application exceptions.

```
Create a dedicated Logs Explorer page at /dashboard/logs with a full-text search input and log level filter buttons (DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR). Query ClickHouse efficiently using parameterized queries. Build a companion Risks and Errors Inbox page at /dashboard/errors that groups exceptions by fingerprint, showing occurrence counts, stack traces, and the affected service name with options to mark issues as resolved.
```

6. **AI-Assisted Root Cause Analysis** — Integrate the Vercel AI SDK to analyze captured logs and stack traces, providing automated explanations and remediation suggestions.

```
Implement an AI root-cause analysis feature using the Vercel AI SDK and Anthropic API. Add an 'Analyze with AI' button to the error detail view that fetches recent logs and stack trace context, sends them to Claude with a system prompt optimized for site reliability engineering, and streams the markdown diagnostic explanation directly into a modal component in the UI.
```

### Cost vs paying

**Starting costs (one-time):**

- Custom domain name: $12/yr
- Total: ~$12 one-time

**Ongoing costs (monthly):**

- AI coding tools subscription: $20/mo
- Fly.io & Vercel hosting: $10/mo
- Total: ~$30/mo

- Paying for the SaaS instead: $49/mo+
- Build time: 80+ hours
- AI tool credits: $20/mo (Claude Pro / Cursor)
- Break-even: Never (Buy New Relic for production reliability)

## Sources

- [New Relic Official Website & Platform Overview](https://newrelic.com)
- [New Relic Wikipedia Profile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Relic)