Amazon CloudWatch vs New Relic

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Amazon CloudWatch vs New Relic: What are the differences?

Amazon CloudWatch and New Relic are two popular monitoring and observability tools used in the world of cloud computing. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), while New Relic is a comprehensive observability platform designed to help organizations monitor and analyze application performance. Here are the key differences between them:

  1. Data Sources: Amazon CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring AWS resources like EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 buckets, etc. It captures and analyzes metrics, logs, and events from these resources, providing insights into their health, availability, and performance. On the other hand, New Relic has extensible support for multi-cloud and hybrid environments, allowing businesses to monitor not only AWS resources but also on-premises, other cloud providers, and third-party services. It provides a broader range of integrations and can collect data from various applications, services, and components.

  2. Alerting and Notification: Amazon CloudWatch offers basic alerting features, allowing users to set up alarms based on predefined thresholds for metrics. When the alarm state is triggered, an alert can be sent via various notification mechanisms, including email, SMS, and Amazon SNS. In contrast, New Relic provides a more advanced and flexible alerting system. It supports complex conditions, dynamic thresholds, multiple notification channels, and integration with popular incident management tools like PagerDuty and Slack. New Relic's alerting capabilities enable more fine-grained control over monitoring and alerting workflows.

  3. Dashboards and Visualization: Both Amazon CloudWatch and New Relic offer customizable dashboards for data visualization and analysis. However, New Relic provides a more user-friendly and intuitive interface for building interactive dashboards and exploring metrics. It offers powerful charting capabilities, pre-built visualizations, and drag-and-drop functionality. Additionally, New Relic provides out-of-the-box dashboards and curated views for various use cases, saving time and effort in dashboard creation.

  4. Application Performance Monitoring (APM): New Relic goes beyond traditional infrastructure monitoring by offering comprehensive APM capabilities. It provides deep insights into application performance, including transaction traces, code-level visibility, slowest SQL queries, error analysis, and more. With New Relic APM, developers can identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and troubleshoot application issues more efficiently. While Amazon CloudWatch has basic application monitoring capabilities, it does not offer the same level of detailed analysis and visibility as New Relic.

  5. Automation and Integration: Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with other AWS services, making it easy to collect and analyze metrics within the AWS ecosystem. It seamlessly integrates with AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, and various other services. New Relic, on the other hand, provides extensive integration options beyond AWS. It supports popular programming languages and frameworks, offering SDKs, agents, and APIs for seamless data collection, automation, and integration with diverse environments and technologies.

  6. Pricing and Cost Model: Amazon CloudWatch pricing is based on the number of metrics, events, alarms, and logs ingested, as well as the number of API requests made. While the pricing can vary based on the specific usage, CloudWatch offers a free tier to get started. New Relic pricing is based on the types of data sources monitored and the volume of data ingested. It offers different pricing plans and tiers based on the organization's needs. While both services have pricing calculators to estimate costs, New Relic typically comes at a higher price point compared to Amazon CloudWatch.

In summary, Amazon CloudWatch focuses on monitoring AWS resources, provides basic alerting and dashboard features, and is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem. New Relic, on the other hand, offers broader data source support, advanced alerting capabilities, intuitive visualization, in-depth APM capabilities, extensive integration options, and a comprehensive pricing model suited for multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

Advice on Amazon CloudWatch and New Relic
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogNew RelicNew Relic
and
SysdigSysdig

We are looking for a centralised monitoring solution for our application deployed on Amazon EKS. We would like to monitor using metrics from Kubernetes, AWS services (NeptuneDB, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, etc) and application microservice's custom metrics.

We are expected to use around 80 microservices (not replicas). I think a total of 200-250 microservices will be there in the system with 10-12 slave nodes.

We tried Prometheus but it looks like maintenance is a big issue. We need to manage scaling, maintaining the storage, and dealing with multiple exporters and Grafana. I felt this itself needs few dedicated resources (at least 2-3 people) to manage. Not sure if I am thinking in the correct direction. Please confirm.

You mentioned Datadog and Sysdig charges per host. Does it charge per slave node?

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

Can't say anything to Sysdig. I clearly prefer Datadog as

  • they provide plenty of easy to "switch-on" plugins for various technologies (incl. most of AWS)
  • easy to code (python) agent plugins / api for own metrics
  • brillant dashboarding / alarms with many customization options
  • pricing is OK, there are cheaper options for specific use cases but if you want superior dashboarding / alarms I haven't seen a good competitor (despite your own Prometheus / Grafana / Kibana dog food)

IMHO NewRelic is "promising since years" ;) good ideas but bad integration between their products. Their Dashboard query language is really nice but lacks critical functions like multiple data sets or advanced calculations. Needless to say you get all of that with Datadog.

Need help setting up a monitoring / logging / alarm infrastructure? Send me a message!

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Maik Schröder
Recommends
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InstanaInstana

Hi Medeti,

you are right. Building based on your stack something with open source is heavy lifting. A lot of people I know start with such a set-up, but quickly run into frustration as they need to dedicated their best people to build a monitoring which is doing the job in a professional way.

As you are microservice focussed and are looking for 'low implementation and maintenance effort', you might want to have a look at INSTANA, which was built with modern tool stacks in mind. https://www.instana.com/apm-for-microservices/

We have a public sand-box available if you just want to have a look at the product once and of course also a free-trial: https://www.instana.com/getting-started-with-apm/

Let me know if you need anything on top.

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Attila Fulop
Management Advisor at artkonekt · | 2 upvotes · 336.1K views

I have hands on production experience both with New Relic and Datadog. I personally prefer Datadog over NewRelic because of the UI, the Documentation and the overall user/developer experience.

NewRelic however, can do basically the same things as Datadog can, and some of the features like alerting have been present in NewRelic for longer than in Datadog. The cool thing about NewRelic is their last-summer-updated pricing: you no longer pay per host but after data you send towards New Relic. This can be a huge cost saver depending on your particular setup

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/accounts/accounts-billing/new-relic-one-pricing-billing/new-relic-one-pricing-billing

I'd go for Datadog, but given you have lots of containers I would also make a cost calculation. If the price difference is significant and there's a budget constraint NewRelic might be the better choice.

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Decisions about Amazon CloudWatch and New Relic
Attila Fulop

I haven't heard much about Datadog until about a year ago. Ironically, the NewRelic sales person who I had a series of trainings with was trash talking about Datadog a lot. That drew my attention to Datadog and I gave it a try at another client project where we needed log handling, dashboards and alerting.

In 2019, Datadog was already offering log management and from that perspective, it was ahead of NewRelic. Other than that, from my perspective, the two tools are offering a very-very similar set of tools. Therefore I wouldn't say there's a significant difference between the two, the decision is likely a matter of taste. The pricing is also very similar.

The reasons why we chose Datadog over NewRelic were:

  • The presence of log handling feature (since then, logging is GA at NewRelic as well since falls 2019).
  • The setup was easier even though I already had experience with NewRelic, including participation in NewRelic trainings.
  • The UI of Datadog is more compact and my experience is smoother.
  • The NewRelic UI is very fragmented and New Relic One is just increasing this experience for me.
  • The log feature of Datadog is very well designed, I find very useful the tagging logs with services. The log filtering is also very awesome.

Bottom line is that both tools are great and it makes sense to discover both and making the decision based on your use case. In our case, Datadog was the clear winner due to its UI, ease of setup and the awesome logging and alerting features.

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Benoit Larroque
Principal Engineer at Sqreen · | 4 upvotes · 433.9K views

I chose Datadog APM because the much better APM insights it provides (flamegraph, percentiles by default).

The drawbacks of this decision are we had to move our production monitoring to TimescaleDB + Telegraf instead of NR Insight

NewRelic is definitely easier when starting out. Agent is only a lib and doesn't require a daemon

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Pros of Amazon CloudWatch
Pros of New Relic
  • 76
    Monitor aws resources
  • 46
    Zero setup
  • 30
    Detailed Monitoring
  • 23
    Backed by Amazon
  • 19
    Auto Scaling groups
  • 11
    SNS and autoscaling integrations
  • 5
    Burstable instances metrics (t2 cpu credit balance)
  • 3
    HIPAA/PCI/SOC Compliance-friendly
  • 1
    Native tool for AWS so understand AWS out of the box
  • 415
    Easy setup
  • 344
    Really powerful
  • 245
    Awesome visualization
  • 194
    Ease of use
  • 151
    Great ui
  • 106
    Free tier
  • 80
    Great tool for insights
  • 66
    Heroku Integration
  • 55
    Market leader
  • 49
    Peace of mind
  • 21
    Push notifications
  • 20
    Email notifications
  • 17
    Heroku Add-on
  • 16
    Error Detection and Alerting
  • 13
    Multiple language support
  • 11
    SQL Analysis
  • 11
    Server Resources Monitoring
  • 9
    Transaction Tracing
  • 8
    Apdex Scores
  • 8
    Azure Add-on
  • 7
    Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network
  • 7
    Detailed reports
  • 6
    Performance of External Services
  • 6
    Error Analysis
  • 6
    Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting
  • 6
    Application Response Times
  • 5
    Most Time Consuming Transactions
  • 5
    JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)
  • 4
    Browser Transaction Tracing
  • 4
    Top Database Operations
  • 4
    Easy to use
  • 3
    Application Map
  • 3
    Weekly Performance Email
  • 3
    Pagoda Box integration
  • 3
    Custom Dashboards
  • 2
    Easy to setup
  • 2
    Background Jobs Transaction Analysis
  • 2
    App Speed Index
  • 1
    Super Expensive
  • 1
    Team Collaboration Tools
  • 1
    Metric Data Retention
  • 1
    Metric Data Resolution
  • 1
    Worst Transactions by User Dissatisfaction
  • 1
    Real User Monitoring Overview
  • 1
    Real User Monitoring Analysis and Breakdown
  • 1
    Time Comparisons
  • 1
    Access to Performance Data API
  • 1
    Incident Detection and Alerting
  • 1
    Best of the best, what more can you ask for
  • 1
    Best monitoring on the market
  • 1
    Rails integration
  • 1
    Free
  • 0
    Proce
  • 0
    Price
  • 0
    Exceptions
  • 0
    Cost

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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
Cons of New Relic
  • 2
    Poor Search Capabilities
  • 20
    Pricing model doesn't suit microservices
  • 10
    UI isn't great
  • 7
    Expensive
  • 7
    Visualizations aren't very helpful
  • 5
    Hard to understand why things in your app are breaking

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What is Amazon CloudWatch?

It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.

What is New Relic?

The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.

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What companies use New Relic?
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What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch and New Relic?
Datadog
Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Splunk
It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
Prometheus
Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.
AWS CloudTrail
With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis can collect and process hundreds of gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, allowing you to easily write applications that process information in real-time, from sources such as web site click-streams, marketing and financial information, manufacturing instrumentation and social media, and operational logs and metering data.
See all alternatives