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Ably vs New Relic

Ably scores higher on the AgentReady, 60/100 against 51/100. They differ on 4 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Ably. Ably provides a realtime infrastructure platform that enables developers to build live, interactive experiences.

New Relic. Intelligent Observability platform that resolves issues at scale before they impact bottom line

Where Ably is ahead

Ably passes authentication documented, and New Relic does not. That is understand, whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it.

It also holds adopt: no mandatory sales call. New Relic misses it.

And on operate, structured, predictable output and idempotency support. New Relic misses those.

What neither does

Both fail llms-full.txt / full agent docs, mcp discoverable, structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Both sit at 80/100 here. Ably misses llms-full.txt / full agent docs, mcp discoverable; New Relic misses llms-full.txt / full agent docs, mcp discoverable.

Understand. Ably leads 31 to 23. Ably misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; New Relic misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented.

Adopt. Ably leads 75 to 65. Ably misses programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available; New Relic misses no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available.

Operate is whether an agent can run against it in production and recover when a call fails. Ably leads 53 to 35. Ably misses machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified; New Relic misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified.

Pricing

Ably does not publish a machine-readable starting price and has a free tier. New Relic does not publish one and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Ably clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Ably and New Relic. Alternatives to each: Ably, New Relic.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["ably", "newrelic"]}