How we saved 90% on our monitoring bill by dropping New Relic for Signoz

3 May 2025 By  Eugene Evenwel Tooling

For years, New Relic was our go-to tool for application monitoring and performance tracing. It delivered on functionality but started to fall short where it really mattered: cost control, ingestion flexibility, and long-term sustainability for a growing agency like ours.

After carefully evaluating the alternatives, we made the switch to self-hosted SigNoz — and haven’t looked back since.

This post explains why we moved away from New Relic, how SigNoz meets our needs, and what the migration has meant for both our internal operations and our clients.

The Problem With New Relic

New Relic offers a robust monitoring platform, but it comes at a steep price — especially when usage begins to scale.

Here’s what we ran into:

  • Usage-based billing with unpredictable spikes: Traffic surges or logging misconfigurations could cause unexpected bills.
  • Lack of fine-grained ingestion control: Difficult to filter what gets ingested unless you implement and maintain complex agent configurations.
  • Vendor lock-in: Their custom SDKs and ecosystem make it hard to port data or change tools.
  • Growing costs with every client added: Every new application monitored meant a higher baseline cost.

For an agency managing dozens of client websites and web applications, the model quickly became unsustainable.

Why We Chose Self-Hosted SigNoz

SigNoz stood out not just as a cheaper alternative, but as a better fit for the way we build and manage systems.

1. Cost Savings We Can Pass On

Running SigNoz ourselves eliminates usage-based billing entirely. We deployed it on a dedicated 2 vCPU, 6GB RAM server via VULTR, and we use Cloudflared to proxy access.

This means:

  • No charges based on the number of traces or logs, except for the fixed cost of server storage.
  • Predictable infrastructure cost regardless of how many services we monitor.
  • Immediate reduction in monthly spend — over 90% in our case.

These savings allow us to offer monitoring and diagnostics to our clients without needing to upsell or absorb rising software fees.

2. Full Control Over What Gets Sent and Stored

With New Relic, we were forced to send more data than necessary, just to ensure we didn’t miss key metrics. SigNoz flips that dynamic.

  • We define exactly what we want to collect using OpenTelemetry.
  • We can discard unnecessary fields before ingestion.
  • We determine our own retention policies and don’t pay extra for longer-term storage.

This results in a cleaner observability pipeline that aligns with our actual needs and lets us avoid bloated dashboards and inflated metrics.

3. Built Around OpenTelemetry

SigNoz is fully aligned with the OpenTelemetry ecosystem — the emerging standard for application instrumentation.

  • It works natively with the OpenTelemetry Collector.
  • Our existing projects in Node.js, Python, and PHP integrate with minimal effort.
  • Future updates and integrations will only become easier as OpenTelemetry continues to evolve.

We’re no longer tied to proprietary agents or SDKs, and we gain the freedom to adapt or migrate parts of our stack with minimal effort.

4. Logs, Metrics, and Traces — All in One Place

SigNoz gives us full-stack observability in a single interface:

  • Metrics are stored in ClickHouse and easily queried.
  • Traces show us exactly where time is spent and bottlenecks occur.
  • Logs are collected and displayed alongside traces for faster debugging.

No need to maintain separate tools or stitch together partial views. The unified setup drastically shortens our time-to-resolution.

Our Real-World Setup

We run SigNoz on a 2 vCPU, 6GB RAM VPS hosted on Vultr, and use Docker Compose with their official images.

  • Metrics and traces are stored in ClickHouse.
  • Logs are handled via OpenSearch.
  • A Cloudflare Tunnel (via cloudflared) exposes the SigNoz dashboard only where we need it.

We’ve configured custom retention and rotation scripts so we can manage data growth on our own terms.

Results So Far

Since migrating to SigNoz:

  • We’ve reduced monitoring costs by over 90%.
  • We’ve gained the ability to monitor more client sites without increasing platform spend.
  • Our developers debug faster thanks to improved tracing and log correlation.
  • We offer performance insights as part of our standard dev retainer, not a costly add-on.

This has made our monitoring stack more scalable, sustainable, and aligned with how we operate.

When SigNoz Might Not Be Right for You

While SigNoz has worked well for us, it may not be the perfect fit for every team:

  • It requires basic DevOps knowledge for setup, updates, and maintenance.
  • There’s no built-in support unless you pay for their enterprise offering.
  • It helps to be familiar with Docker, OpenTelemetry, and ClickHouse.

But if you’re comfortable running services in Docker and value observability you can control, SigNoz offers an exceptional balance of power and flexibility.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: How much does it cost to self-host SigNoz compared to New Relic?

While New Relic’s costs vary based on usage and can spike unexpectedly, our self-hosted SigNoz setup runs on a 2 vCPU, 6GB RAM VPS, resulting in over 90% cost reduction. The only fixed costs are the server infrastructure.

Q2: Do I need special technical expertise to set up SigNoz?

Yes, you’ll need basic DevOps knowledge and familiarity with Docker, OpenTelemetry, and ClickHouse. The setup process requires comfort with running and maintaining services in a Docker environment.

Q3: Will I lose any monitoring capabilities by switching from New Relic to SigNoz?

No, SigNoz provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities including metrics, traces, and logs in a single interface. It uses OpenTelemetry standards and supports multiple programming languages including Node.js, Python, and PHP.

Q4: How does data retention work with self-hosted SigNoz?

Unlike New Relic’s tiered pricing for data retention, self-hosted SigNoz allows you to configure custom retention and rotation policies. You control how long to keep your data based on your storage capacity and requirements.

Q5: Is there professional support available for SigNoz?

While the self-hosted version doesn’t include built-in support, SigNoz does offer an enterprise version with professional support. However, you’ll need to rely on community resources and your own technical expertise for the open-source version.

Final Thoughts

New Relic served us well in the early days, but as our agency grew, it became clear that we needed a monitoring platform that scaled with us — not against us.

Self-hosted SigNoz gave us that and more. It’s a reliable, cost-effective, and fully transparent observability solution that we now trust across all our projects.

If you’re hitting the same limits we did with traditional SaaS observability tools, consider giving SigNoz a serious look.