Skip to main content
JobCannon
All skills
⚡

New Relic Infrastructure

⬢ TIER 2Tools
💰
Medium
Salary impact
⏱
2 months
Time to learn
📊
Medium
Difficulty
👥
—
Careers
At a glance

New Relic Infrastructure monitors hosts (VMs, bare metal) and container environments. Collects metrics (CPU, memory, disk, I/O, processes), logs, and events. Integrates with APM for end-to-end observability. Mastery takes 2-3 weeks. Cost: $0.30-0.70/GB for logs, $0.50-1.00/compute unit for monitoring. Teams using New Relic report 50-70% faster incident resolution and 20% reduction in infrastructure costs (via optimization). Scarcity is low; most DevOps teams know basic monitoring, few optimize for cost and SLAs.

What is New Relic Infrastructure

New Relic Infrastructure is a monitoring platform that collects host and container metrics. It monitors CPU, memory, disk usage, I/O, network, and process-level metrics from servers (VMs, bare metal) and Kubernetes environments. Data is sent to New Relic cloud, visualized in dashboards, and queryable via NRQL (New Relic Query Language). New Relic integrates with APM (application performance monitoring) for end-to-end observability: infrastructure health + application health. Combine to diagnose: is latency spike due to slow app code or high CPU on host?

🔧 TOOLS & ECOSYSTEM
New Relic DashboardNew Relic APINRQL (query language)Custom instrumentationAlerts and notificationsIntegrations (PagerDuty, Slack)Kubernetes monitoringLog aggregation

💰 Salary by region

RegionJuniorMidSenior
🇺🇸USA$70k$115k$170k
🇬🇧UK$42k$70k$105k
🇪🇺EU$48k$78k$115k
🇨🇦CANADA$65k$105k$155k

🎓 Certifications

New Relic Documentation→NRQL Query Language→Infrastructure Monitoring Best Practices→

❓ FAQ

▶Should I use New Relic or Datadog or Prometheus?
Prometheus: open-source, free, steep learning curve. Datadog: most features, expensive ($15-20/month per host). New Relic: good balance (ease + features + cost ~$5-10/month per host). Start with Prometheus if budget-constrained; migrate to Datadog/New Relic as you grow.
▶What's the difference between Infrastructure and APM?
Infrastructure: host-level metrics (CPU, memory, disk, I/O). APM: application-level (request latency, error rate, throughput). Both needed. Infrastructure = OS health, APM = app health. Together = full observability.
▶How do I reduce New Relic costs?
Costs = data volume. Reduce cardinality: don't tag every request with customer ID (creates N unique metrics). Sample logs (send 1-in-10). Prune metrics you don't use. Budget ~$500-2k/month for typical SaaS.
▶Can I monitor Kubernetes with New Relic?
Yes, native support. Install agent on each node. Monitors pods, nodes, containers. See CPU/memory per pod, node performance, etcd health. Works with any Kubernetes distribution (EKS, GKE, AKS, on-prem).
▶How do I set up alerts without alert fatigue?
Start narrow: alert only on critical issues (error rate > 5%, latency > 2s). Tune false positives (alerts that fire but are benign). Use alert conditions with duration (must be high for 5 min, not 1 sample). Escalate to PagerDuty only for critical alerts.
🎯

Not sure this skill is for you?

Take a 10-min Career Match — we'll suggest the right tracks.

Find my best-fit skills →

Find your ideal career path

Skill-based matching across 2,536 careers. Free, ~10 minutes.

Take Career Match — free →
Browse more:All skillsCareer libraryPersonality testsMethodology