New Relic Uptime Monitoring Alternative with Phone Call and SMS Alerts

Yes. New Relic does uptime monitoring through Synthetic Monitoring. The simplest type, the ping monitor, requests a URL on a schedule from one or more public locations and fails when the response is wrong. New Relic's own docs describe it as a simple Java HTTP client that checks whether an application is online; it is not a full browser and does not run JavaScript.

The ping monitor is more capable than its name suggests. Its API exposes a validation string (text that must appear in the response), TLS certificate validation, an option to treat redirects as failures, and intervals from every minute to once a day. By default it sends a HEAD request and can be set to use GET instead. For checking that a page is up, it is a solid tool.

For simple ping monitors, close to nothing. New Relic's January 2023 synthetics pricing notice says ping monitors are included in every edition at no extra cost, and only non-ping checks count against the allowance: 500 a month on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro and 10 million on Enterprise. Checks above that cost $0.005 each, and one run from one location is one check.

The real cost is people. Basic users are free but cannot use the synthetic monitoring experience. A full platform user is free for one person on the Free edition, $10 for the first and $99 for each additional one on Standard (up to five), and $349 a month on Pro with an annual commitment, according to newrelic.com/pricing in October 2026. Then add whatever paging service turns an alert into a phone call. The full breakdown is in our New Relic synthetics pricing article.

Not on its own. The destinations New Relic lists for alert notifications are Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, webhooks, email, AWS EventBridge, PagerDuty, New Relic Mobile Push, Microsoft Teams and Workflow Automation. There is no native SMS or voice destination, so a text or a call at night goes through PagerDuty or a similar tool, which is priced per user.

Mobile push from the New Relic app is the closest built-in option. A push notification is easy to sleep through and stops after one buzz. A downtime alert by phone call that repeats is a different thing, and it is the reason most teams on this page are looking.

Stay on New Relic for uptime if your engineers already live in it, you have a PagerDuty or Opsgenie rotation, and you want failed checks next to traces and logs. Its ping monitors run from several public locations at once, match text in the response body, and cost nothing extra. We check from a single location and do not do content matching, so for that job New Relic is the stronger and cheaper tool.

It is also the better choice when you need scripted browser or multistep API tests. Those are New Relic's strength and we do not sell them.

The case for moving is narrow and specific. It fits a team that uses New Relic's free or Standard edition, has no paging tool, and has missed an outage because the alert sat in email or Slack. It fits an agency or store owner who signed up for New Relic for one dashboard and finds the platform heavy for the question "is the site up". And it fits a team that would otherwise buy several $99 full platform seats only so more people can manage monitors.

For them, $99 a month for 25 endpoints with calls to every listed number is usually cheaper than adding a paging tool for three or four people, and it takes minutes rather than a policy review. If you also run Datadog, our Datadog uptime monitoring alternative page covers the same move from a per run meter.