Traceloop vs New Relic AI Monitoring
Both are observability & tracing tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
Traceloop
The company behind OpenLLMetry, acquired by ServiceNow in March 2026 to power AI Control Tower. The Apache-2.0 SDK is safe and still actively developed - the managed platform's standalone future is the open question.
New Relic AI Monitoring
LLM monitoring layered onto New Relic's APM platform, billed on data ingested - which is close to the worst possible meter for verbose agent traces. One reported deployment went from $1,400 to $12,000 a month after turning it on.
| Traceloop | New Relic AI Monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Observability & Tracing | Observability & Tracing |
| Our rating | 3/5 | 2/5 |
| Starting price | Custom | $0.40/GB ingested |
| Billing meter | span | gb-ingested |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | Yes, free | No or paid tier only |
| Best for | Teams that want vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry LLM instrumentation via OpenLLMetry, which is genuinely safe to adopt. The managed platform suits existing ServiceNow customers, or teams needing air-gapped deployment who can get contractual clarity on the roadmap. | Organisations already standardised on New Relic for APM, logs, Kubernetes and SRE workflows, running relatively low-volume LLM features, who need correlation more than evaluation. |
Our verdict on Traceloop
Split this decision in two, because the SDK and the platform now carry very different risk. OpenLLMetry - the Apache-2.0 OpenTelemetry extension - is one of the safest things you can adopt in this category. It is permissively licensed, the team publicly committed it stays that way, it exports to 25+ backends including Datadog, and it remained actively maintained through the acquisition. You can instrument with it and never create a Traceloop account. The managed platform is a different question. ServiceNow acquired Traceloop in March 2026, reportedly for $60 to $80 million, and shipped the integration into AI Control Tower at Knowledge 2026 in May. The stated strategic purpose is enterprise AI governance inside ServiceNow, not an independent observability product. The site still promotes signups and nothing suggests a Helicone-style wind-down, but a standalone product whose parent bought it for a different purpose is a roadmap you do not control. Use the SDK freely. Get contractual clarity before you build on the platform.
Full Traceloop review →Our verdict on New Relic AI Monitoring
New Relic AI Monitoring makes sense for exactly one buyer - the organisation already committed to New Relic - and is a poor choice for anyone else. The correlation story is real, and the applied intelligence and SRE agent tooling is more mature than anything the AI-native vendors offer. But two structural problems dominate. First, the billing meter is data ingested, and LLM traces are among the most verbose telemetry in existence - prompts, completions, tool payloads and retrieved context routinely make a single trace 5 to 50 KB. Charging per gigabyte for that is close to the worst possible fit, and one reported deployment saw its bill go from $1,400 to between $9,500 and $12,000 a month after AI Monitoring volumes were counted. Second, it does not evaluate anything. There is no faithfulness, relevance or hallucination scoring, and no annotation or dataset curation. It tells you what your LLM did and what it cost, not whether the output was any good. If you need evaluation, you are buying a second tool regardless.
Full New Relic AI Monitoring review →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between Traceloop and New Relic AI Monitoring?
Traceloop: Teams that want vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry LLM instrumentation via OpenLLMetry, which is genuinely safe to adopt. The managed platform suits existing ServiceNow customers, or teams needing air-gapped deployment who can get contractual clarity on the roadmap. New Relic AI Monitoring: Organisations already standardised on New Relic for APM, logs, Kubernetes and SRE workflows, running relatively low-volume LLM features, who need correlation more than evaluation. Both sit in Observability & Tracing, so the decision usually comes down to billing model and deployment rather than raw capability.
Which is cheaper, Traceloop or New Relic AI Monitoring?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - Traceloop bills on span and New Relic AI Monitoring bills on gb-ingested. Published starting prices are Custom and $0.40/GB ingested respectively, but those numbers are not comparable until you apply them to the same traffic. Use our cost calculator to model both against your own request volume and span count.
Can I self-host Traceloop or New Relic AI Monitoring?
Traceloop: Yes, free. New Relic AI Monitoring: No or paid tier only. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.