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Azure Application Insights vs New Relic: What are the differences?
Azure Application Insights and New Relic are two popular application performance monitoring (APM) tools used to monitor and troubleshoot web applications. Let's explore the key difference between them.
Integration with Azure Services: Azure Application Insights is a native monitoring solution provided by Microsoft Azure, which seamlessly integrates with other Azure services and provides in-depth monitoring and diagnostics capabilities for applications hosted on Azure. On the other hand, New Relic is a third-party APM tool that can be used with Azure services, but it requires additional configuration and setup to integrate with Azure-specific components.
Pricing Model: Azure Application Insights is part of the Azure platform and offers a range of pricing options, including a free tier for basic monitoring and paid plans for more advanced features and higher data volumes. New Relic, on the other hand, follows a subscription-based pricing model, where the cost is determined based on the number of hosts or applications being monitored, along with the desired feature set.
Analytics and Visualization: Both Azure Application Insights and New Relic offer powerful analytics and visualization capabilities to help analyze application performance data. However, there are differences in the depth and flexibility of these capabilities. Azure Application Insights leverages the power of Azure Monitor and provides rich analytics and visualization options, including custom dashboards, log analytics, and integration with other Azure services like Azure Log Analytics and Azure Data Explorer. New Relic also offers advanced analytics and visualization features, but its capabilities may be more tailored towards specific application types or use cases.
Language and Platform Support: Azure Application Insights and New Relic support a wide range of programming languages and platforms. However, there may be differences in the level of support and availability of specific features for different languages and platforms. Azure Application Insights has native support for several popular programming languages, including .NET, Java, Node.js, and Python, and provides SDKs and instrumentation libraries for easy integration with different application types. New Relic also supports multiple languages and platforms but may have variations in the level of support and maturity for different ecosystems.
Alerting and Notifications: When it comes to alerting and notifications, both Azure Application Insights and New Relic offer similar functionalities, allowing users to set up custom alerts based on specific metrics or thresholds. However, there may be differences in the ease of setup and configurability. Azure Application Insights integrates with Azure Monitor and provides a flexible alerting system that can send notifications through various channels, such as email, SMS, or Azure Logic Apps. New Relic also offers a robust alerting system but may have variations in terms of available notification channels or integrations with external systems.
Ecosystem and Community: Azure Application Insights is part of the larger Azure ecosystem, which comes with its own set of benefits, including access to a wide range of Azure services, documentation, and community support. Being a Microsoft product, there is a vast community of developers and resources available for troubleshooting and learning. New Relic, on the other hand, has its own ecosystem and community that provides dedicated support and resources for users of their platform. The size and focus of the ecosystem/community may influence the availability of resources or community-driven extensions/plugins.
In summary, Azure Application Insights offers seamless integration with Azure services, customizable pricing options, and deep integration with Azure Monitor. New Relic, on the other hand, provides a flexible pricing model, advanced analytics and visualization features, and a dedicated ecosystem/community for support.
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Pros of Azure Application Insights
- Focus in detect performance anomalies and issues5
- Integrated with Azure3
- Live Metrics1
- User flow1
- Availability tests (Heart Beat check)1
Pros of New Relic
- Easy setup415
- Really powerful344
- Awesome visualization245
- Ease of use194
- Great ui151
- Free tier106
- Great tool for insights80
- Heroku Integration66
- Market leader55
- Peace of mind49
- Push notifications21
- Email notifications20
- Heroku Add-on17
- Error Detection and Alerting16
- Multiple language support13
- SQL Analysis11
- Server Resources Monitoring11
- Transaction Tracing9
- Apdex Scores8
- Azure Add-on8
- Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network7
- Detailed reports7
- Performance of External Services6
- Error Analysis6
- Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting6
- Application Response Times6
- Most Time Consuming Transactions5
- JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)5
- Browser Transaction Tracing4
- Top Database Operations4
- Easy to use4
- Application Map3
- Weekly Performance Email3
- Pagoda Box integration3
- Custom Dashboards3
- Easy to setup2
- Background Jobs Transaction Analysis2
- App Speed Index2
- Super Expensive1
- Team Collaboration Tools1
- Metric Data Retention1
- Metric Data Resolution1
- Worst Transactions by User Dissatisfaction1
- Real User Monitoring Overview1
- Real User Monitoring Analysis and Breakdown1
- Time Comparisons1
- Access to Performance Data API1
- Incident Detection and Alerting1
- Best of the best, what more can you ask for1
- Best monitoring on the market1
- Rails integration1
- Free1
- Proce0
- Price0
- Exceptions0
- Cost0
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Cons of Azure Application Insights
- Difficult to surface information2
- Custom instrumentation via code only1
- UI is clunky and gets in the way1
Cons of New Relic
- Pricing model doesn't suit microservices20
- UI isn't great10
- Expensive7
- Visualizations aren't very helpful7
- Hard to understand why things in your app are breaking5
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