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 is user type?
A user's user type is what determines the maximum set of New Relic capabilities a user is entitled to access. (In addition to user type, there can be additional role-related restrictions.)
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 a brief summary of the capabilities of each user type:
Basic user | Core user | Full platform user |
---|---|---|
Basic users are free. Basic users can set up our observability tools, run queries on your data, use custom (quickstart dashboards up to 7 days), use some basic alerting features, and more. Basic users can't use our curated experiences (for example, our UI, browser UI, or mobile UI). | Core users can access more features than basic users but less than full platform users. They have access to some powerful developer-centric features like New Relic CodeStream, errors inbox, and our log management UI. | Full platform users can access everything, including our more curated observability UI experiences, such as APM, infrastructure monitoring, browser monitoring, mobile monitoring, synthetic monitors, and more. |
For a more detailed comparision, see the capabilities table.
Remember that the user type overrides any role-related permissions.
How to pick a user type
Before deciding on user types, you'll want to understand the billing impacts 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 need full access to the New Relic platform (our curated dashboards and other experiences), not only the ability to query and create custom charts.
- 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).
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 don't need full platform access to use our curated experiences and , but would benefit from creating custom queries and charts of data.
- 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 manage users or billing.
User type capability comparison table
Below is a detailed comparison of capabilities by user type. Important points about this table:
- The table comes from our pricing page. To find the table, visit the User costs heading and click View permissions.
- Many of the features require access to our UI experiences, not to the underlying data. All users can query all data in the accounts they can access and can create and view custom charts. For instance, basic users can access data, browser monitoring data, and more, but can't access curated UI experiences.
- 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.
For tips on why you'd choose one user type versus another, see Decide on user type.
Capability | Basic user permissions | Core user permissions | Full platform user permissions |
---|---|---|---|
550+ integrations (Instant Observability and quickstarts, except curated views) | |||
Custom charts and dashboards | |||
Custom events | |||
Full-stack observability view of entities | Explorer, Lookout, Navigator; list view only
| Explorer, Lookout, Navigator; except deviating signals
| Explorer, Lookout, Navigator
|
GraphQL API (NerdGraph) | |||
In-app collaboration | |||
Log management | Searching/viewing only
| ||
Powerful querying capabilities | |||
Quickstart dashboards | Up to 7 days
| Up to 7 days
| |
Receiving alerts and notifications | |||
Admin settings (managing billing and users) | |||
Building and running custom New Relic apps * | |||
Error tracking with errors inbox | Except attributes analysis
| ||
New Relic CodeStream IDE extension | |||
AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) | |||
Application performance monitoring (APM) | |||
Browser monitoring | |||
Change tracking | |||
Database monitoring | |||
Distributed tracing | |||
Infrastructure monitoring | |||
Kubernetes monitoring with Pixie * | |||
Machine learning (ML) model performance monitoring (MLOps) | |||
Mobile monitoring | |||
Network monitoring | |||
OpenTelemetry monitoring | |||
Security monitoring (Vulnerability Management) ** | |||
Serverless monitoring | |||
Service and entity maps | |||
Service-level management | |||
Synthetic monitoring | |||
Workloads |
* Subject to additional terms and conditions.
** New Relic Vulnerability Management is included for up to 100 GB of data ingest and requires Data Plus or additional cost beyond that.
Here are additional details about permissions 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:
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.