Transitioning from New Relic to Grafana can be a strategic move for organizations looking to optimize their monitoring and observability practices. One of the primary drivers behind this shift is the cost-saving potential of Grafana's open-source platform.

Unlike New Relic's subscription-based model, Grafana offers businesses a scalable and budget-friendly way to monitor systems without compromising on performance.

Beyond cost, Grafana’s ecosystem stands out for its unmatched customizability and flexibility. Its modular design allows organizations to tailor their monitoring stack to specific needs, integrating seamlessly with various data sources. This level of adaptability empowers teams to build dashboards and visualizations that align perfectly with their workflows and objectives.

Additionally, using Grafana gives businesses greater control over their monitoring infrastructure, allowing them to fine-tune performance and avoid reliance on proprietary solutions.

However, transitioning from New Relic to Grafana does come with its challenges. Migrating existing dashboards, alerts, and integrations requires meticulous planning and execution to ensure data continuity.

Grafana’s modular approach, while powerful, can feel unfamiliar to teams accustomed to New Relic’s streamlined interface, necessitating a learning curve. Despite these hurdles, many organizations find the benefits of flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and control to make the transition worth the effort.

In this blog, we will cover the steps involved in a smooth migration from New Relic to Grafana, strategies to overcome key challenges, and tips to maximize the potential of Grafana for your observability needs. So, let's get started.

When evaluating monitoring solutions, New Relic and Grafana often emerge as top contenders, each catering to different needs and preferences. While New Relic offers an all-in-one SaaS platform designed for ease of use, Grafana provides a modular, open-source alternative that emphasizes flexibility and control.

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Below is a comparison of their core differences and strengths:

Planning Your Transition

A successful transition from New Relic to Grafana requires careful planning to ensure that your monitoring and observability needs are fully met. By thoroughly evaluating your current setup and aligning it with Grafana's capabilities, you can streamline the migration process while maintaining visibility into your infrastructure.

Evaluate Your Monitoring and Observability Needs

Start by identifying the critical metrics, logs, and traces you currently monitor using New Relic. These may include application performance metrics, server health, or end-user experience data. Once you have a comprehensive list, map these requirements to tools and data sources supported by Grafana.

For instance, Grafana integrates seamlessly with Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for tracing. This ensures that your observability framework remains robust post-migration.

Additionally, analyze New Relic’s features that are most valuable to your workflows and find equivalent solutions within the Grafana ecosystem. Grafana offers a modular approach where you can build similar or even more tailored functionalities using plugins and configurations, such as the Grafana New Relic Data Source Plugin for accessing New Relic data directly within Grafana dashboards.

Want to know more about Grafana New Relic Data Source Plugin? Read this doc!

Choosing Data Sources for Grafana

The choice of data sources is central to your transition. Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, allowing you to tailor your observability stack to your use cases.

Commonly recommended options include:

• Prometheus: Ideal for collecting and querying time-series metrics.

Demo Dashboard: an example Grafana dashboard which queries Prometheus for data.***

• Loki: A lightweight, cost-effective solution for centralized logging.
• Elasticsearch: Perfect for advanced log analytics and search capabilities.

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• InfluxDB: Great for high-performance time-series data handling.

To know more about Grafana’s support for Prometheus, Read this doc!

To know more about Grafana’s support for Loki, Read this doc!

To know more about Grafana’s support for ElasticSearch, Read this doc!

To know more about Grafana’s support for InfluxDB, Read this doc!

When selecting data sources, align them with your observability goals.

For example:

• Use Prometheus for tracking server performance or application uptime.
• Choose Loki for scalable log aggregation and querying.
• Opt for Elasticsearch to handle high-volume logs and enable advanced filtering.

Planning carefully at this stage ensures your Grafana implementation not only matches but also enhances your existing monitoring capabilities.

One of the most critical steps in transitioning from New Relic to Grafana is migrating your dashboards. This process involves recreating key visualizations and adapting them to Grafana’s flexible and feature-rich ecosystem.

With proper planning and tools, you can build dashboards that not only replicate but also enhance the capabilities of your existing setup.

Recreating New Relic Dashboards in Grafana

To begin, identify the key dashboards in New Relic that you rely on for monitoring and troubleshooting. Exporting data and visualizations directly from New Relic can simplify this process, though this feature may be limited to certain plans.

If direct export is unavailable, manually note the metrics, queries, and visualizations used in each dashboard.

In Grafana, you can recreate these dashboards by leveraging its powerful tools:

• Pre-built Community Plugins: Grafana's community offers a wide range of plugins and templates designed to streamline the migration process. For example, the Grafana New Relic Data Source Plugin allows you to connect New Relic data directly to Grafana, enabling a smoother transition for existing dashboards.
• Custom Queries for Visualizations: Use Grafana's query editor to replicate or refine New Relic queries. Grafana supports multiple data sources like Prometheus, Loki, and Elasticsearch, enabling you to fetch and visualize the same metrics.

Take this opportunity to optimize your dashboards by organizing panels more effectively, improving layout consistency, and adding missing metrics or KPIs critical to your operations.

Enhancing Dashboards with Grafana’s Features

Migrating to Grafana allows you to go beyond simply replicating New Relic dashboards. You can take advantage of Grafana’s advanced features to enrich your visualizations and insights:

• Panel Plugins: Grafana’s extensive library of panel plugins provides a diverse range of visualization options, such as heatmaps, geomaps, and custom graphs, for a more intuitive representation of your data.
• Annotations: Add context to your dashboards by using annotations to mark key events, deployments, or incidents. This feature helps teams correlate events with performance metrics in real-time.
• Alerts: Configure threshold-based alerts directly within Grafana. These alerts can notify teams through integrations with Slack, PagerDuty, or email, ensuring prompt responses to critical issues.

By carefully migrating and enhancing your dashboards, you can unlock Grafana's full potential while maintaining continuity in your monitoring practices.

To know more about Read this Document.

Reconfiguring alerts and ensuring effective incident management are essential aspects of transitioning from New Relic to Grafana. Grafana’s unified alerting system provides flexibility and advanced integrations to help you maintain and improve your incident response workflows during and after migration.

Reconfiguring Alerts

The first step is to map the alert conditions you’ve set up in New Relic to Grafana’s unified alerting framework. Start by identifying the threshold-based conditions critical to your operations, such as application latency, error rates, or resource utilization.

In Grafana, these conditions can be reconfigured using:

• Threshold-Based Conditions for Metrics: Create custom alert rules using Grafana’s query editor, setting thresholds for specific metrics based on your requirements.
• Integrations with Prometheus Alertmanager: For teams using Prometheus, Grafana can integrate with Alertmanager to support advanced alerting logic, such as grouping, silencing, and routing alerts.

Example:

Suppose you had a New Relic alert configured to notify your team when application latency exceeds 200ms. In that case, you can replicate this in Grafana by setting up a query that monitors the latency metric and applying a threshold condition. Alerts can then be routed to your preferred notification channels.

Setting Up Notification Channels

Replacing New Relic’s notification system is straightforward with Grafana’s wide range of integrations. Grafana supports several notification channels, including:

• Slack: Configure channels for team collaboration during incidents.
• PagerDuty: Integrate PagerDuty for escalation policies and on-call workflows.
• Email and Webhooks: Use email for simple alerts or custom webhooks for integration with other systems.

For a smoother transition, tools like Doctor Droid can be used to analyze and optimize alert configurations, ensuring reduced noise and more actionable alerts during the migration process. This helps prevent alert fatigue and ensures your team focuses on the most critical issues.

By thoughtfully reconfiguring alerts and leveraging Grafana’s notification integrations, you can maintain a robust incident management system while taking advantage of Grafana’s advanced capabilities.

Also, Read Guide to New Relic Alerting and Grafana Alerting: Advanced Alerting Configurations & Best Practices

Migrating logs and traces from New Relic to Grafana involves transitioning to tools like Loki and Tempo, which integrate seamlessly with Grafana to provide robust log monitoring and distributed tracing capabilities. Proper configuration ensures a smooth transition and enhances your ability to monitor and troubleshoot effectively.

Transitioning from New Relic Logs to Loki

Grafana Loki is a cost-effective and scalable alternative to New Relic Logs, designed specifically for log aggregation and querying. To transition your logs:

1. Export Logs from New Relic: If possible, export your existing logs in a format compatible with Loki, such as JSON or plain text.
2. Ingest Logs into Loki: Use Loki’s supported data collection tools, like Promtail, Fluentd, or Logstash, to send logs to Loki. Detailed setup instructions can be found in Loki's documentation.
3. Optimize Queries and Dashboards: With logs ingested, use Grafana’s query builder to create efficient queries tailored to your observability needs. Leverage features like filters, regex, and parsers to extract meaningful insights from your logs.

Once configured, you can build dashboards that combine log data with other metrics for a unified view of your infrastructure.

Handling Distributed Tracing

Replacing New Relic APM with Grafana Tempo or other tracing tools provides powerful options for managing distributed traces. Tempo is optimized for high-scale, low-cost tracing and integrates directly with Grafana for visualization.

1. Set Up Tempo: Deploy Tempo as your tracing backend and configure your applications to export traces using open-source libraries like OpenTelemetry or Jaeger.
2. Visualize Trace Data in Grafana: Use Grafana’s built-in tools to connect to Tempo and visualize trace data. This allows you to identify latency bottlenecks, service dependencies, and failure points quickly.
3. Create Troubleshooting Dashboards: Build dashboards that combine traces, logs, and metrics for comprehensive observability. This correlation helps in root-cause analysis during incidents.

By migrating to Loki and Tempo, you not only replicate New Relic’s capabilities but also gain greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Resources like Loki’s visualization guide provide step-by-step instructions to maximize the effectiveness of your setup.

Integrating Grafana with your existing tools is crucial for building a seamless observability ecosystem. By connecting Grafana with powerful data sources like Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, and more, you can maintain continuity while enhancing your monitoring capabilities.

Prometheus for Metrics Collection

Prometheus is a popular open-source tool for collecting and querying metrics, and it integrates effortlessly with Grafana:

1. Set Up Prometheus: Deploy Prometheus and configure it to scrape metrics from your infrastructure or applications. Ensure your services are instrumented with Prometheus-compatible exporters.
2. Connect Prometheus to Grafana: In Grafana, add Prometheus as a data source by providing the Prometheus URL and any necessary authentication details.
3. Create Dashboards: Use Grafana’s query editor to fetch metrics from Prometheus and build customized dashboards. Examples include CPU usage, memory consumption, or custom application performance metrics.

With Prometheus as a metrics source, you can gain real-time insights into your system’s performance while leveraging Grafana’s advanced visualization capabilities.

AWS CloudWatch and Other Sources

Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including cloud services like AWS CloudWatch and databases like MySQL and Elasticsearch:

• CloudWatch: Add CloudWatch as a data source in Grafana to pull metrics from AWS services such as EC2, Lambda, and RDS. Ensure you configure the necessary IAM permissions for Grafana to access your AWS account.
• Other Sources: Grafana also integrates with databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), search engines (Elasticsearch), and logging systems, enabling a unified view of metrics, logs, and traces.

These integrations ensure you can monitor all aspects of your infrastructure, regardless of where the data resides.

To know more about Grafana’s support for AWS Cloud Watch, Read this Doc!

Doctor Droid for Alert Insights

Alert migration can be one of the most complex parts of transitioning to Grafana, but tools like Doctor Droid simplify the process. Doctor Droid helps analyze and optimize your existing alert configurations during migration:

1. Simplify Alert Migration: Use Doctor Droid to evaluate your New Relic alert rules, ensuring they are accurately replicated in Grafana.
2. Optimize Configurations: The tool helps reduce alert noise and refine thresholds to ensure your team receives actionable alerts.
3. Streamline Setup: With Doctor Droid’s insights, you can quickly configure Grafana’s alerting system, integrating with Slack, PagerDuty, or other channels for seamless notifications.

***Want to know more about Doctor Droid? Visit https://drdroid.io/***

By integrating these tools, you can replicate and enhance your observability setup while taking full advantage of Grafana’s flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

After completing the migration to Grafana, fine-tuning your setup ensures it performs efficiently and scales effectively with your growing observability needs. Optimizing data sources, queries, and dashboards will help you make the most of Grafana’s capabilities.

Performance Tuning

The performance of your Grafana setup is heavily influenced by how well your data sources are configured. To optimize response times:

• Adjust Data Source Settings: Ensure appropriate timeouts and caching settings are applied for each data source. For example, reducing query timeouts for Prometheus can prevent slow queries from affecting dashboard performance.
• Limit Data Retention: Configure data sources like Loki or Prometheus to retain only the data you need for analysis, reducing storage and query overhead.
• Use Alert Query Caching: Cache frequently queried metrics used in alerts to minimize resource usage during real-time evaluations.

Query Efficiency

Efficient queries are essential for handling large datasets and ensuring smooth dashboard performance:

• Simplify Queries: Use filtering, grouping, and aggregation functions to narrow down the data returned by your queries. For example, instead of fetching all CPU metrics, group them by region or application.
• Avoid Overloading Dashboards: Limit the number of queries per dashboard to reduce the load on your data sources and ensure faster load times.
• Test and Monitor Query Performance: Regularly analyze the execution time of your queries and optimize them as your datasets grow.

Dashboards Scalability

Grafana’s templating and dynamic features allow dashboards to scale with your infrastructure:

• Use Templated Dashboards: Replace static values in your dashboards with variables to create dynamic, reusable dashboards.
• Group Panels Logically: Organize panels into collapsible rows or tabs for better readability and faster rendering.
• Leverage Drilldowns: Add panel links or drill-downs to navigate between dashboards easily, providing deeper insights without overwhelming a single view.

By focusing on performance, query efficiency, and dashboard scalability, you can ensure Grafana remains a powerful, responsive, and user-friendly tool as your monitoring needs evolve.

After completing your migration to Grafana, it’s important to focus on validating your setup and ensuring teams are fully equipped to use the new platform effectively. These steps will help you maximize the value of your Grafana implementation.

Validation and Testing

Ensuring that Grafana replicates and enhances your previous observability setup is a critical post-migration step:

• Compare Dashboards and Alerts: Validate that dashboards in Grafana closely match their New Relic counterparts. Check for consistency in metrics, visualizations, and thresholds.
• Verify Data Accuracy: Ensure the data being pulled into Grafana is accurate and reflects real-time changes in your environment. Cross-check data points between Grafana and New Relic to confirm parity.
• Test Alerts: Simulate scenarios to trigger alerts and verify that they fire correctly and are routed to the appropriate notification channels. This ensures no gaps in your incident management process.

Thorough validation minimizes risks, builds confidence in the transition, and ensures a smooth handover to teams.

Training Teams

Educating your teams on Grafana’s capabilities is vital for successful adoption:

• Familiarize Users with Grafana’s Interface: Conduct hands-on training sessions to help users navigate Grafana’s dashboards, query editors, and alerting systems.
• Provide Guides: Share step-by-step documentation or video tutorials for common tasks, such as creating and modifying dashboards, setting up alerts, and integrating data sources.
• Encourage Experimentation: Empower team members to explore Grafana’s features, such as creating templated dashboards, adding annotations, or experimenting with plugins.
• Designate Grafana Champions: Identify power users who can act as internal experts, supporting the rest of the team during the transition.

By validating your setup and training your teams, you can ensure a smooth transition to Grafana, foster user confidence, and fully leverage its capabilities for improved observability.