A novel series of 4-aminoantipyrine derived transition metal complexes were synthesized and characterized by physicochemical methods like elemental analysis, molar conductivity, magnetic susceptibility measurements and multispectral techniques such as FT-IR, UV–Visible, NMR, EPR, ESI-mass analysis and scanning electron microscopy. The DMSO solutions of the metal complexes show low molar conductance values, which might be due to the non-electrolytic nature of the complexes. The spectral analysis imply that the metal complexes hold octahedral geometry around the central metal ion. The synthesized compounds were performed for their biological perspective studies such as DNA interaction (binding and damage), antimicrobial, anticancer, antioxidant activities. The binding nature of the complexes with calf thymus DNA (CT-DNA) has been investigated by electronic absorption titration and viscosity measurements. The DNA binding measurement results reveal that the synthesized complexes interact with DNA through intercalation mode. In addition, DNA cleavage studies demonstrates that ability of the complexes show oxidative cleavage of pUC19 DNA in the presence of activator. The antimicrobial activity of the synthesized compounds was studied against a set of microbes. The in-vitro cytotoxic activity of the synthesized compounds was examined on MCF-7, HepG2, HBL-100 cell lines using an MTT assay. Moreover, the antioxidant activity shows that the metal complexes have the ability to break preferably the hydroxyl radical than the ligand. The in silico ADMET studies reveal that Schiff base ligand and complexes possess greater biological potential. The prediction of activity spectra for substance (PASS) for synthesized ligand explains to support the drug-like nature of the compound. The molecular docking studies have been performed to identify the nature of binding of the compounds with DNA and COX-2 enzyme.