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Crashlytics vs New Relic: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this Markdown code, we will explore the key differences between Crashlytics and New Relic, two popular tools used for monitoring and managing software performance.
Deployment Method: Crashlytics is predominantly a mobile app crash reporting SDK that is primarily used in conjunction with Fabric, a mobile app development platform. On the other hand, New Relic is a comprehensive application performance monitoring solution that supports a wide range of applications and platforms, including both mobile and web applications.
Focus: Crashlytics primarily focuses on capturing crash reports and providing detailed insights into crash events, enabling developers to diagnose and resolve issues efficiently. New Relic, on the other hand, offers a more holistic approach by monitoring and analyzing the overall application performance, including metrics like response times, throughput, errors, and more.
Features: Crashlytics provides detailed crash reports with information like stack traces, affected devices, operating systems, and occurrence frequencies. It also offers real-time alerts for critical crashes. New Relic, on the other hand, offers a wide range of features that go beyond crash reporting, including server monitoring, database monitoring, transaction tracing, code-level visibility, and more.
Integration: Crashlytics seamlessly integrates with the Fabric platform, which provides a suite of development tools. It is primarily targeted towards mobile app developers using programming languages like Swift and Objective-C for iOS, and Java and Kotlin for Android development. New Relic, on the other hand, offers integrations with a wide range of development platforms and programming languages, including mobile, web, and backend technologies.
Pricing Model: Crashlytics, along with its associated tools in the Fabric platform, is available as part of Firebase, Google's comprehensive platform for developing mobile and web applications. Firebase offers a free tier and flexible pricing plans based on usage. New Relic, on the other hand, follows a subscription-based pricing model with different tiers based on the required features and scale of usage.
User Interface and Dashboard: Crashlytics provides a straightforward, streamlined user interface that focuses on crash reporting and analysis. Users can access crash reports, filter and search for specific crashes, view affected devices, and track crash frequencies. New Relic, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive and customizable user interface with a range of dashboards, charts, and graphs that provide insights into various aspects of application performance, including crash reports.
In summary, Crashlytics is a specialized crash reporting tool that is tightly integrated with the Fabric platform and primarily focuses on mobile app crash reporting, while New Relic offers a more comprehensive application monitoring solution with a wider range of features and support for various platforms and languages.
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 Crashlytics
- Crash tracking78
- Mobile exception tracking56
- Free53
- Easy deployment37
- Ios25
- Great ui15
- Great reports11
- Android10
- Advanced Logging8
- Monitor Tester Lifecycle7
- Mac APP and IDE Plugins3
- Great User Experience3
- In Real-Time3
- iOS SDK3
- Security3
- Android SDK3
- The UI is simple and it just works2
- Best UI2
- Light2
- Real-time2
- Seamless2
- Painless App Distribution2
- Crash Reporting2
- Beta distribution2
- Mobile Analytics2
- Deep Workflow Integration2
- IOS QA Deploy and tracking1
- Easy iOS Integration1
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 Crashlytics
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