Organization and account structure

Understanding the structure of New Relic organizations and accounts will help you with finding data in New Relic and setting up user access.

Organizations and accounts

At New Relic, an organization represents a New Relic customer. Your New Relic organization contains everything relevant to you and your team members: your organization's accounts, users, and data.

When you sign up for New Relic, it creates an organization containing a single account. A Standard edition organization can only have a single account. Pro and Enterprise edition organizations can add more accounts.

An account can have many sources of data reporting to it. For example, a single account could have data reporting from our infrastructure agent, an APM agent, and other integrations. All data reported to New Relic requires an account ID, which tells New Relic which account to put that data in. That ID is also used for some account-specific tasks, like making API calls.

When you set up user access, you give users access to specific accounts.

Cross-account access

New Relic provides various cross-platform functionality that gives users access to data in multiple accounts. For example, you can assign users access to multiple accounts. And features like distributed tracing, custom dashboards, and workloads allow you to see data from entities monitored in other accounts, if you're assigned access to those accounts.

But there are some cross-account boundaries. For example, the query builder only lets you query in the account you're currently in (to make a cross-account query, you'd have to use our NerdGraph API). Avoiding such obstacles is the main reason to attempt to minimize the number of accounts you have.

Reasons to add accounts

Why you'd add more accounts depends on your goals and structure. There's nothing preventing even quite large organizations from having a single account, or only two or three accounts.

When planning out your accounts, you should try to minimize the number of accounts in your organization as much as you can. This is for two reasons:

• It makes it simpler to plan and manage the accounts your users have access to, and
• It makes it easier for your users to use some New Relic features (for example, having fewer cross-account restraints in the query builder).

Some example reasons to add accounts:

• To separate production and testing environments. For example, you might name one account Invoice processing dev and another Invoice processing prod.
• To make it easier to separate billing for different departments.
• To separate projects of any sort that involve fairly distinct datasets.
• To control user access to different projects or data sets. For example, you might want to set up an account for outside contractors that only contains data from certain entities, and creating a separate account is one way to do that.

For how to add and rename accounts, see Add accounts.

How users access accounts

In your organization, your New Relic users are granted access to specific accounts that are relevant to their duties and responsibilities. To manage users' access to accounts, you grant groups access to specific roles on specific accounts. Our user management system allows you to create the user access you need, whether that's a relatively simple setup with just a few roles across a few accounts, or a complex one with many roles across many accounts. Learn more about user management.

Note that some features, like dashboards and workloads, can display data from across different accounts in an organization. This means that if a user isn't granted access to all relevant accounts, they may experience missing data.

To learn more about access issues, see Factors affecting access.

Original user model

If your users are still on our original user model, the account structure and access works differently: see Original user model account access.