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Blackfire.io vs New Relic: What are the differences?
Introduction
Blackfire.io and New Relic are both performance monitoring tools used in web development. While they both offer similar features, there are some key differences that set them apart.
Pricing Model: Blackfire.io offers flexible pricing options, allowing users to choose between monthly or annual subscriptions. On the other hand, New Relic follows a usage-based pricing model, where users pay based on the number of hosts or user sessions they monitor. This difference in pricing models gives users the freedom to choose the most suitable option for their specific needs.
Focus on Performance: Blackfire.io primarily focuses on performance tuning and optimization. It provides detailed insights into application performance, including code profiling, request analysis, and performance comparisons. New Relic, on the other hand, offers a broader range of monitoring capabilities, including infrastructure monitoring, error tracking, and application performance monitoring. While both tools have performance monitoring features, Blackfire.io provides a more focused and in-depth analysis of application performance.
Integration and Platform Support: New Relic supports a wide range of programming languages and platforms, including Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, and more. It also offers integrations with popular frameworks and cloud platforms. On the other hand, Blackfire.io has deeper integration with PHP and Symfony, providing specific features and optimizations for PHP applications. Blackfire.io also supports other programming languages like Python and Golang but with more limited features compared to New Relic.
User Interface and Ease of Use: New Relic offers a user-friendly and intuitive interface with a wide range of dashboards and visualizations. It provides a comprehensive overview of performance metrics and allows users to easily navigate and analyze the data. Blackfire.io has a more specialized and developer-centric interface, focusing on detailed code-level analysis and profiling. It may have a steeper learning curve for users who are not familiar with performance profiling.
Deployment Options: New Relic offers both hosted and on-premises deployment options. Users can choose to use New Relic's cloud-based platform or deploy their own New Relic agents on their infrastructure. Blackfire.io, on the other hand, is primarily a cloud-based service. It offers easy integration with popular cloud platforms and eliminates the need for additional infrastructure setup. This difference in deployment options provides users with flexibility and choice based on their specific requirements.
Community and Support: New Relic has a larger and more established community, with a vast knowledge base and active user forums. It also provides comprehensive documentation and support resources. Blackfire.io, while not as large as New Relic's community, has a dedicated community of developers and provides extensive documentation and support. Both tools offer support channels, including email, live chat, and phone support, ensuring users can get assistance when needed.
In summary, Blackfire.io and New Relic are performance monitoring tools with key differences in pricing models, focus on performance, integration options, user interface, deployment choices, and community support. These differences allow users to choose the tool that best fits their needs, whether they require a more focused performance analysis or a broader range of monitoring capabilities.
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.
Coming from a Ruby background, we've been users of New Relic for quite some time. When we adopted Elixir, the New Relic integration was young and missing essential features, so we gave AppSignal a try. It worked for quite some time, we even implemented a :telemetry reporter for AppSignal . But it was difficult to correlate data in two monitoring solutions, New Relic was undergoing a UI overhaul which made it difficult to use, and AppSignal was missing the flexibility we needed. We had some fans of Datadog, so we gave it a try and it worked out perfectly. Datadog works great with Ruby , Elixir , JavaScript , and has powerful features our engineers love to use (notebooks, dashboards, very flexible alerting). Cherry on top - thanks to the Datadog Terraform provider everything is written as code, allowing us to collaborate on our Datadog setup.
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