New Relic vs Wavefront: What are the differences?

Key Differences between New Relic and Wavefront

1. Data Collection: New Relic primarily collects data through agents installed on the monitored applications, which can capture detailed metrics and traces. On the other hand, Wavefront supports agentless data ingestion, using open-source collectors like StatsD, Telegraf, or fluentd, making it easy to collect data from various sources without the need for specific installations.
2. Data Visualization and Exploration: New Relic offers pre-built dashboards and visualizations that make it easy to analyze data and identify performance issues. In contrast, Wavefront provides a highly customizable and interactive querying interface that allows users to explore data using its query language. This flexibility in data exploration and visualization makes Wavefront suitable for complex analysis and troubleshooting scenarios.
3. Metrics Resolution: New Relic has a default metric resolution of one minute, which means it collects and displays metrics at a lower granularity. On the other hand, Wavefront provides a configurable metric resolution, enabling users to set it as low as one-second resolution, providing more granular and real-time insights into the system's performance.
4. Alerting and Anomaly Detection: New Relic offers a comprehensive alerting system that allows users to define thresholds based on various metrics and receive notifications when anomalies occur. Wavefront, on the other hand, goes a step further by leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms to automatically detect anomalies without the need for manually setting thresholds, providing a more proactive approach to identifying performance issues.
5. Integration: New Relic provides extensive integrations with various monitoring tools, databases, and cloud platforms, making it easy to collect data from different sources. Wavefront also offers integrations with popular tools and platforms, but it goes beyond that by providing the ability to ingest custom metrics and events through its API, allowing users to integrate and analyze data from any source.
6. Scalability and Multi-Tenancy: New Relic is designed to scale horizontally by adding more agent instances, but it has limitations on the total volume of metrics it can handle. Wavefront, on the other hand, is highly scalable and built for multi-tenancy, allowing it to handle massive amounts of data with ease, making it well suited for large-scale deployments and organizations with multiple teams sharing the same monitoring platform.

In summary, New Relic and Wavefront differ in their approach to data collection, visualization, resolution, alerting, integration capabilities, and scalability. New Relic focuses on detailed monitoring of applications through agents, while Wavefront emphasizes agentless data collection, advanced analytics, and scalability for handling large volumes of data.