Last week, application performance management (APM) startup New Relic announced the launch of New Relic Insights, a real-time analytics platform for web applications. Formerly code-named Rubicon, New Relic Insights consists of two parts: a set of analytics extensions/agents added to the enterprise application, and a cloud based service that ingests the data from the applications and allows detailed querying, analysis and reporting. New Relic’s agents extract data from the enterprise app and then store and present the information in real-time via its SQL-like query language. The entire service is a custom, closed source creation, and is not based on any existing open-source solutions such as Hadoop.

New Relic Insights helps users go beyond just crash-reporting and into more real-time data extraction and analytics, and is one piece of New Relic’s broader portfolio of planned products that includes APM (web, mobile and browser-based) and server performance monitoring amongst other things. In itself this looks like a pretty holistic approach geared towards monitoring performance across the hardware and software stack. At the same time, the interesting thing to note is that the use-cases (and correspondingly the buying decision makers) across these products are quite different from each other, spanning IT Operations, Web Development, Mobile Development and Business Analysis. In that sense, it will be interesting to see how successful New Relic will be in making its broad vision a reality. Indeed, New Relic Insights could be by itself already a challenging proposition, in terms of purposing a single platform for analytics and business intelligence across a variety of applications.

So, where might this go? Might this be just a posturing tactic by New Relic to scare off early-entrepreneurs in this domain, or is New Relic laying out the vision for what might eventually become a strategy driven by inorganic growth? Could this be a blueprint that mobile APM leaders such as Opus portfolio company Crittercism should also evaluate? We will see, but for now, it is at the least interesting that in a world that on the face of it seems to be going all-in into open-source, New Relic is joining Splunk and a few other analytics players in building a closed-source, custom analytics solution.