In 2026, data-sovereign teams, particularly those in regulated industries, face significant challenges when choosing observability platforms. Compliance with laws such as HIPAA, GDPR, India’s DPDP Act, and PCI-DSS often makes SaaS-only solutions like New Relic unsuitable due to data residency concerns. These regulations dictate that sensitive telemetry data, which may include personal identifiers or payment information, must remain within the team’s infrastructure. Consequently, many organizations are seeking alternatives that offer self-hosted deployment options to ensure data remains within their control.
Several alternatives to New Relic have emerged, offering varied deployment models and pricing structures. CubeAPM, for instance, provides a self-hosted, OpenTelemetry-native platform that ensures telemetry data never leaves a company’s network, offering significant cost savings and compliance assurance. Similarly, Elastic APM and Grafana Cloud offer self-hosted options, allowing teams to maintain data residency and avoid cloud egress fees.
While platforms like Datadog and Dynatrace offer robust features and integrations, their SaaS-only architectures may not meet the compliance needs of all teams. For those with existing investments in Splunk or the ELK stack, expanding to include observability features can be a natural progression, provided the self-hosted path is available.
Ultimately, for teams where data residency is non-negotiable, the choice of observability platform hinges on the ability to keep telemetry data within their infrastructure. For those where SaaS deployment is permissible, considerations shift towards cost predictability and OpenTelemetry support. As the landscape evolves, organizations must weigh their compliance requirements against the capabilities and costs of available observability solutions.
