User type: basic, core, and full platform users

In this doc you'll learn how we define user type, what capabilities each user type has, and how to decide on a user type.

Want to learn about how users are calculated for billing purposes? See New Relic pricing. If you haven't already, be sure to sign up for a New Relic account. It's free, forever.

What's the "user type"?

A user's user type is what determines the set of New Relic capabilities a user can theoretically access. A user's user type takes precedence and overrides any role-related restrictions. (Learn more about factors that affect user access.)

There are three user types:

• Basic user: several basic but powerful New Relic platform capabilities.
• Core user: more capabilities than a basic user.
• Full platform user: all capabilities.

To skip to learning more about capabilities, see Capabilities. To learn more about the user type concept, keep reading.

Basic users are free, while core users and full platform users are billable. This doc is focused on what user types have access to: for details on billing, see User billing.

If you're tasked with adding New Relic users, one of the key decisions to make is what user type to make them. If you're not sure at first, you can add them as basic users and later decide which users you want to upgrade. For how to adjust user type, see Manage user type.

The user type is meant to be a fairly long-term setting based on a user's expected responsibilities over the next several months or longer. That intention is reflected in our billing calculations and downgrade rules. To make more frequent or more granular adjustments to what a user can access, you should use roles.

Overview of user type capabilities

Here's an overview of the capabilities of each user type:

Remember that the user type overrides any role-related permissions.

How to pick a user type

Most New Relic customers are on our usage-based pricing, and if you're on that pricing model, user type is a factor in billing. Before deciding on user types, you'll want to understand the user-related calculations and downgrade rules. For an in-depth capability comparison, see the Capability table.

Here are some tips for deciding on a user type:

Reasons to make someone a full platform user:

• They play a key role in the development, testing, deployment, and maintenance phases of the application development lifecycle.
• They break/fix code regularly; they are responsible for triaging workflows, troubleshooting, or managing users and roles for their team.
• They have DevOps practices (for example, version control systems, and implementation of CI/CD).
• They need full access to the New Relic platform (our curated dashboards and other experiences), not only the ability to query and create custom charts.

Reasons to make someone a core user:

• They're developers who aren't tasked with reliability and uptime as their main responsibility.
• They don't require full platform access, but would benefit from some of the specific functionalities offered to core users, like:
  • Debugging code issues directly from their IDE, using New Relic CodeStream.
  • Viewing errors in one place from across your stack, using Errors inbox.
  • Using our Logs UI to spot problems and patterns in logs.
  • The ability to use apps from our New Relic app catalog.
• They need to be able to manage users and/or billing (both core and full platform users can do that).

Reasons to make someone a basic user:

• They play a key role in the planning phase of the application development lifecycle.
• They use and configure New Relic tools to get data into New Relic, and access, configure, and use alerts on such data, but are not necessarily responsible for triaging workflows, troubleshooting, or managing users and roles for their team.
• They want to see high-level analytics and business metrics for future planning (as is often true of C-suite executives).
• They don't need to use our curated experiences and dashboards, but would benefit from the ability to create their own custom queries and charts of data; in other words, they don't need full access to the platform.
• They don't manage users or billing.

Detailed user type comparison table

Here's a detailed comparison of capabilities by user type. Important points about this table:

• The user type is meant to be a long-term setting. User-type-related restrictions override role-based permissions. Learn more about user access factors.
• Many of the features in the table refer to access to the UI experiences, not to the underlying data itself. All users, including basic users, can query all data in the accounts they have access to, and can create and view custom charts. Put another way: basic users can access APM data, browser monitoring data, and more, but they don't have access to our curated UI experiences.

For tips on why you'd choose one user type versus another, see Decide on user type.

¹Here are more details about how user type access works for some features:

Manage user type and upgrade requests

How you manage a user's user type depends on which user model your organization's users are on:

• Docs for our newer user model
• Docs for our original user model

For rules around billing and downgrading users, see Billing and downgrade rules.

Learn how user type relates to roles

For an explanation of how the concept of user type relates to our roles, see User management concepts.

Lacking access to something?

For questions related to lack of access to New Relic accounts or features, see Factors affecting access.