New Relic Synthetic Monitoring is the uptime and user-journey testing component inside New Relic's full-stack observability platform. It's capable, well-integrated, and priced in a way that will give your finance team pause if uptime monitoring is all you actually need.
Vigilmon is purpose-built for a single job: knowing when your services go down, confirming it across multiple regions, and alerting you fast. This comparison breaks down what each tool does, what each costs for the uptime monitoring use case specifically, and when one is clearly the right call over the other.
What New Relic Synthetic Monitoring Is
New Relic Synthetics is one feature set inside New Relic One — a platform that spans APM, infrastructure monitoring, browser/RUM, log management, error tracking, dashboards, and more.
The Synthetics component specifically includes:
- Ping monitors: Simple HTTP availability checks run from New Relic probe locations
- Simple Browser monitors: Scripted checks using a headless Chrome instance
- Scripted Browser monitors: Complex multi-step user journey simulations with full JavaScript scripting
- API Step monitors: Chained REST API calls where each step can use data from the previous response
- Cert check monitors: SSL certificate expiry tracking
These monitors run from New Relic's network of probe locations, fire alerts via New Relic's alerting system, and integrate with APM traces, dashboards, and SLO tracking across the platform.
For teams fully invested in New Relic, Synthetics is a natural part of the observability story. For teams evaluating it purely as an uptime monitoring solution, the pricing model deserves close examination.
What Vigilmon Is
Vigilmon monitors whether your services are reachable and alerts you the moment they're not. It covers HTTP/HTTPS endpoints, TCP ports, SSL certificate expiry, and cron job heartbeats.
The distinguishing architecture is multi-region consensus: Vigilmon probes your service from multiple geographic locations simultaneously and only fires an alert when a quorum of regions agree the target is unreachable. Transient probe failures, regional routing anomalies, and CDN hiccups don't generate alerts. Genuine outages do.
No instrumentation agent, no SDK, no prerequisite platform subscription. Add a URL, configure a Slack webhook, and your first alert path is live in under two minutes.
Pricing: New Relic's Consumption Model Under the Microscope
New Relic moved to a data-ingest and seat-based pricing model that's worth understanding in detail before evaluating Synthetics.
New Relic Pricing
| Component | Cost | |---|---| | Free tier | 1 full-platform user, 100 GB data ingest/month | | Core user | $49/user/month (limited UI access) | | Full platform user | $549/user/month | | Additional data ingest | $0.30–$0.50/GB beyond free tier | | Synthetic check allowance (free) | 500 checks/month | | Ping/simple monitors beyond free | $0.005/check | | Scripted browser / step monitors | Higher per-check rates |
The 500-check free allowance in context:
One monitor running at 1-minute intervals generates approximately 43,200 checks per month. The free tier's 500-check allowance covers about 8 hours of monitoring on a single endpoint.
For five endpoints at 1-minute intervals: ~215,000 checks/month. After the free 500, that's 214,500 paid checks × $0.005 = $1,072/month in Synthetic checks alone — before a single user seat is counted.
Annual contracts and volume deals change these numbers significantly, and New Relic's full-platform value justifies the cost when you're using APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and error tracking together. But if your goal is uptime monitoring, New Relic's pricing is structured around teams that are buying the whole platform.
Vigilmon Pricing
| Tier | Cost | Monitors | Check Interval | |---|---|---|---| | Free | $0 | 5 managed / unlimited self-hosted | 3 minutes | | Pro | ~$10–20/month | More monitors | 1 minute | | Self-hosted | ~$5/month VPS | Unlimited | Configurable |
The free tier provides five permanent monitors at 3-minute intervals — more effective coverage for the uptime use case than New Relic's free Synthetics allowance, which runs out in hours.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Vigilmon | New Relic Synthetics | |---|---|---| | HTTP/HTTPS uptime monitoring | ✅ | ✅ | | TCP port monitoring | ✅ | ✅ (via ping monitors) | | SSL certificate monitoring | ✅ | ✅ | | Cron / heartbeat monitoring | ✅ | ❌ | | Multi-region consensus alerting | ✅ | ❌ (per-probe alerts) | | Scripted browser tests | ❌ | ✅ | | Multi-step API flows | ❌ | ✅ (step monitors) | | APM / distributed tracing | ❌ | ✅ (full platform) | | Infrastructure monitoring | ❌ | ✅ (full platform) | | Log management | ❌ | ✅ (full platform) | | Integrated status page | ✅ (included) | ❌ (separate product) | | Self-hostable | ✅ (open source) | ❌ | | Free tier for uptime | 5 monitors, unlimited | 500 checks (~8 hours) | | Standalone product | ✅ | ❌ (requires New Relic platform) | | Setup time for uptime checks | ~2 minutes | 30–60 minutes |
New Relic Synthetics offers capabilities Vigilmon doesn't: scripted browser tests, multi-step API monitors, and deep integration with the full New Relic observability stack. If those capabilities are your requirement, the comparison ends here in New Relic's favor.
For the "is it up?" use case, the table reads differently.
Alert Quality: Single-Probe vs Multi-Region Consensus
New Relic Synthetic monitors dispatch checks from selected probe locations. Each location evaluates independently — a failure at one probe fires an alert, regardless of what every other location sees.
This is the standard design for most uptime monitoring tools, and it's also the source of the false-positive problem endemic to uptime alerting. Regional network events, CDN anomalies, probe-side DNS issues, and transient BGP routing changes all produce alerts for "outages" that self-resolved before you saw the notification. Over time, teams learn to dismiss these alerts — which is exactly when a real outage gets missed.
Vigilmon's consensus model is architecturally different. Every check is simultaneously dispatched to multiple geographic probe regions. An alert fires only when a majority agree the service is unreachable. One probe failing in isolation doesn't wake anyone up. Multiple independent vantage points converging on failure signals a genuine, geographically distributed outage.
For teams already managing New Relic alert noise across APM error rates, infrastructure anomalies, and NRQL alert conditions, adding single-probe Synthetics alerts adds to the noise floor. Vigilmon's dedicated, consensus-filtered external channel provides a structurally quieter signal for the one question that matters most: is the service completely unreachable?
Setup: What It Takes to Get to a Reliable Alert
New Relic Synthetics setup path
- Create a New Relic account and choose a plan
- Navigate to Synthetics in New Relic One
- Create monitors — choose type (ping, simple browser, scripted), select probe locations, set frequency and assertion conditions
- Create an Alert Policy (separate from the monitor) that defines alert conditions
- Create Notification Channels — Slack, PagerDuty, email — via New Relic Alerts
- Create a Workflow that connects the alert policy to the notification channel
- Verify end-to-end that a simulated failure actually reaches the right person
Each step has its own documentation. For a team not already inside New Relic, this process takes 30–90 minutes before the first reliable alert is confirmed. Teams already using New Relic Alerts find the workflow familiar; everyone else has a configuration tax before they can trust the alerting chain.
Vigilmon setup path
- Enter a URL (or TCP host and port)
- Paste a Slack webhook URL or email address
- Click Save
The status page is live immediately. The first probe check runs within minutes. No prerequisites.
When New Relic Synthetic Monitoring Is the Right Choice
You're already a New Relic customer. If your team pays for New Relic APM or infrastructure monitoring, adding Synthetic Monitors is a natural extension with marginal incremental cost. The integration between synthetic check failures and APM traces or error rates in a single platform is genuinely useful for root-cause analysis.
You need scripted browser tests. New Relic's scripted browser monitors can run full multi-step user journeys — sign-in sequences, multi-page checkout flows, OAuth redirect chains — using a real Chrome browser. This is out of scope for basic uptime monitoring tools.
You need multi-step API sequences. Step monitors chain REST calls where subsequent steps depend on responses from earlier ones. This handles authentication-gated endpoint testing that single-URL uptime monitors can't handle.
You have SREs or observability engineers. New Relic's alerting model is powerful but has moving parts — alert policies, alert conditions, workflows, notification channels. It rewards teams with someone who owns the configuration. For teams without dedicated observability ownership, the complexity often sits misconfigured.
You need correlated observability. Seeing a Synthetic failure alongside a P95 latency spike and a database query anomaly in the same timeline can dramatically accelerate root-cause analysis. This is New Relic's strongest argument for teams with complex architectures.
When Vigilmon Is the Right Choice
You want to know when your site is down. External availability — "can users reach this service?" — doesn't require APM. It requires an external probe with multi-region confirmation and a fast alert path.
You're not already a New Relic customer. Adopting New Relic specifically for uptime monitoring means onboarding to an enterprise-scale platform, navigating consumption-based pricing, and configuring alert workflows — for a use case Vigilmon handles in two minutes for free.
You want fewer false alarms. Multi-region consensus is a structural architecture choice that eliminates a class of false positives most monitoring systems don't address. If your team has alert fatigue, the problem is usually single-probe architecture, not configuration.
You need a customer-facing status page. New Relic doesn't include one. Vigilmon's status page is built in, live immediately, and requires no additional setup or subscription.
You're monitoring cron jobs or TCP services. Vigilmon's heartbeat monitoring confirms that cron jobs check in on schedule. TCP monitoring confirms that databases, message brokers, and background services are accepting connections. New Relic Synthetics covers TCP via ping monitors but doesn't handle heartbeat/cron confirmation natively.
You need self-hosted, open-source infrastructure. Vigilmon is open source and deploys on any $5/month VPS. New Relic is SaaS-only.
The Complementary Approach
Many teams run both Vigilmon and New Relic, and the separation of concerns is intentional:
- Vigilmon: External availability. Multi-region confirmation. The first signal that users are being affected.
- New Relic: Internal observability. APM traces, error rates, query performance, infrastructure health.
These tools answer different questions. A service can be "up" — passing all internal health checks and APM metrics — while a network path problem makes it unreachable externally. External uptime monitoring catches that. Conversely, a service can respond to pings while being functionally broken at the application layer. APM catches that.
Teams that want comprehensive observability use both. Teams that primarily want external availability confidence start with Vigilmon and add New Relic when the need for distributed tracing, error aggregation, and infrastructure metrics becomes real.
Running Vigilmon alongside New Relic is zero additional cost on the free tier and provides an independent external signal that doesn't mix into New Relic's alert stream.
Summary Decision Table
| Requirement | New Relic Synthetics | Vigilmon | |---|---|---| | Already using New Relic APM | ✅ natural extension | Parallel option | | Scripted browser tests | ✅ | ❌ | | Multi-step API flow tests | ✅ | ❌ | | Simple HTTP uptime monitoring | ✅ but complex/costly | ✅ free, 2-min setup | | TCP port monitoring | ✅ | ✅ | | Cron job heartbeat monitoring | ❌ | ✅ | | Multi-region consensus | ❌ | ✅ | | Integrated status page | ❌ | ✅ | | Self-hosted open source | ❌ | ✅ | | Free tier for uptime monitoring | 8 hours of checks | 5 monitors, permanent | | Standalone product (no platform buy-in) | ❌ | ✅ |
Conclusion
New Relic Synthetic Monitoring is an excellent component of a full-stack observability investment. When you're already using New Relic for APM, error tracking, and infrastructure metrics, adding synthetic checks unifies your observability signals and adds scripted browser and API testing capabilities that dedicated uptime tools don't offer.
But for teams asking "how do I know when my site is down?" as a standalone question — especially teams not already using New Relic — the consumption-based pricing, platform prerequisites, and configuration complexity make New Relic a poor entry point. You'd be buying an enterprise observability platform to solve a problem that Vigilmon handles in two minutes at zero cost.
The practical answer for most teams: start with Vigilmon for external uptime monitoring. Add New Relic when your architecture and team size genuinely justify the observability depth. Don't pay APM prices for a smoke detector.
Start monitoring for free at vigilmon.online — no credit card, no platform prerequisite, multi-region consensus, status page, and fast alerting included.
Tags: #devops #monitoring #newrelic #apm