User type: basic, core, and full platform users

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 One pricing. If you haven't already, be sure to sign up for a New Relic account. It's free, forever.

What's the "user type"?

A user's user type is what determines the set of New Relic capabilities a user can theoretically access. In practice, users will often have roles assigned to them that limit their capabilities in various ways, but the user type represents their maximum theoretical set of capabilities.

There are three user types:

• Basic user: several basic but powerful New Relic platform capabilities.
• Core user (limited availability): has 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.

On the New Relic One pricing model, basic users are free, and core users and full platform users are billable. Your user count is tracked in the usage UI. Because user count is a billing factor, it's important to understand how user billing calculation works.

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 New Relic responsibilities over the next several months or longer. That intention is reflected in our billing calculations and downgrade rules. For more frequent or more granular adjustments to a user's access, you should use roles.

Overview of user type capabilities

Here's an overview of the capabilities of each user type:

Remember that the user type governs a user's theoretical access. In practice, users can have roles assigned that restrict their access further.

Detailed capability comparison table

Here's a detailed comparison of capabilities by user type. For tips on why you'd make a user one user type or another, see Decide on user type.

¹Here are more details about how user type access works for some specific features:

How to pick a user type

For New Relic One pricing, user type is a factor in billing. Before deciding on user types, you'll want to ensure you understand user-related calculations 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 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).
• They need to use New Relic's curated dashboards and experiences (not just the ability to create their own custom queries and charts); in other words, they need full access to our platform.
• They need to be able to manage users and/or billing.

Reasons to make someone a core user:

• They're developers who aren't tasked with reliability and uptime as their primary 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 build and deploy New Relic One apps, and use apps from the app catalog.

Reasons to make someone a basic user:

• 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 (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 (such as C-Suite executives).
• They don't need to use our curated experiences and dashboards, but would benefit from the ability to create their own custom queries and charts of data; in other words, they don't need full access to the platform.
• They don't manage users or billing.

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:

• New Relic One user model docs
• Original user model docs

For rules around billing and downgrading users, see Billing and downgrade rules.

Learn how user type relates to roles [roles-user-type]

For an explanation of how the concept of user type relates to our roles, see User management concepts.

Change to "full user" language

In November of 2021, in the product and public docs, the "full user" user type name was changed to "full platform user."

For organizations that have the version of New Relic One pricing without core users:

• "Full platform users" are equivalent to what are referred to as "full users" and "monthly provisioned users" in your New Relic agreement. For more about agreement-level language, see Billable user agreement terminology.
• When querying your full platform user counts, you use FullUsersBillable and not FullPlatformUsersBillable.

Lacking access to something?

For questions related to lack of access to New Relic accounts or features, see Factors affecting access.