Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What is Datadog?
What is New Relic?
What is SignalFx?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Why do developers choose Datadog?
Why do developers choose New Relic?
- Easy setup413
- Ease of use193
- Great ui152
- Free tier107
Why do developers choose SignalFx?
Sign up to add, upvote and see more prosMake informed product decisions
What are the cons of using Datadog?
What are the cons of using New Relic?
What are the cons of using SignalFx?
Sign up to add, upvote and see more consMake informed product decisions
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with New Relic?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Stessa
Which #APM / #Infrastructure #Monitoring solution to use?
The 2 major players in that space are New Relic and Datadog Both are very comparable in terms of pricing, capabilities (Datadog recently introduced APM as well).
In our use case, keeping the number of tools minimal was a major selection criteria.
As we were already using #NewRelic, my recommendation was to move to the pro tier so we would benefit from advanced APM features, synthetics, mobile & infrastructure monitoring. And gain 360 degree view of our infrastructure.
Few things I liked about New Relic: - Mobile App and push notificatin - Ease of setting up new alerts - Being notified via email and push notifications without requiring another alerting 3rd party solution
I've certainly seen use cases where NewRelic can also be used as an input data source for Datadog. Therefore depending on your use case, it might also be worth evaluating a joint usage of both solutions.
We currently monitor performance with the following tools:
- Heroku Metrics: our main app is Hosted on Heroku, so it is the best place to get quick server metrics like memory usage, load averages, or response times.
- Good old New Relic for detailed general metrics, including transaction times.
- Skylight for more specific Rails
Controller#actiontransaction times. Navigating those timings is much better than with New Relic, as you get a clear full breakdown of everything that happens for a given request.
Skylight offers better Rails performance insights, so why use New Relic? Because it does frontend monitoring, while Skylight doesn't. Now that we have a separate frontend app though, our frontend engineers are looking into more specialized frontend monitoring solutions.
Finally, if one of our apps go down, Pingdom alerts us on Slack and texts some of us.
Fresha Engineering
Regarding Continuous Integration - we've started with something very easy to set up - CircleCI , but with time we're adding more & more complex pipelines - we use Jenkins to configure & run those. It's much more effort, but at some point we had to pay for the flexibility we expected. Our source code version control is Git (which probably doesn't require a rationale these days) and we keep repos in GitHub - since the very beginning & we never considered moving out. Our primary monitoring these days is in New Relic (Ruby & SPA apps) and AppSignal (Elixir apps) - we're considering unifying it in New Relic , but this will require some improvements in Elixir app observability. For error reporting we use Sentry (a very popular choice in this class) & we collect our distributed logs using Logentries (to avoid semi-manual handling here).
CircleCI
Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.
We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.
DatadogBackground
We're a real-time financial services messaging company, so being able to monitor our servers and applications in real-time is important to us. We also like a good deal, so $15/server seemed a bargain.
What were we looking for?
We wanted to monitor our MS infrastructure (servers, SQL) and apps (C#) to understand performance issues and be able to rectify. We also want to be able to do long-term trending. And we wanted to go from nothing to live in a short time.
Experience
Installing the Datadog agent on the servers was a breeze and enabling the integrations for SQL and Windows trivial.
Using the StatsD based API was also very easy - no worrying about JSON or UDP calls. The ability to add tags to all metrics is also a key benefit. We run multiple (100+) instances of a single application and being able to distinguish events from each one via tagging, or to see aggregates, is extremely useful.
In all it took 2 days R&D to instrument our key applications sufficiently for production deployment. Deploying the agent to our production servers took 30 mins, giving our Ops team complete visibility for the 1st time.
What have we learned
Since we've been live Datadog has given us numerous insights into the way our system behaves, from uneven server loadings and sporadic memory usage to performance tuning a key application that resulted in a 50% increase in throughput. Knowing what's taking the time has been a boon.
Continuous evolution
The other nice surprise has been the evolving nature of Datadog. It seems like every couple of weeks there's a new feature on the site.
Other points
- I like the transparent pricing. Services that won't show me the price without having to talk to a sales person are really annoying.
- Support has been good. We've contacted them several times with questions and always had a quick response (time zone considered...we're in London) and a helpful answer.
So What's bad?
Probably the weakest aspect at the moment is the long term trending of data. Whilst you can wind the time bar back to see what happened last week you can't ask questions like "show me the peak period each day for the last x months". The "get data" API is also fairly weak. Neither are concerns at the moment, and I'm sure they're on the to-do list.
DatadogI've been a systems administrator most of my career. Everywhere I went, I'd have to rebuild the same monitoring + graphing system. And then make sure that every machine wrote to that system and every application handed up the proper metrics through whatever mechanism seemed good at the time.
Then, as CTO of SimpleReach, single-handedly managing over 200 servers in addition to everything else, I found Datadog. We were already using statsd to instrument our applications, now it was just a matter of getting that data to Datadog. We use Chef, so I installed the Datadog agent on every machine in about 10 minutes and we were up and running.
The best part was that we had a deploy problem the next day with one of our main applications and troubleshooting took minutes instead of hours (and Datadog immediately paid for itself). Now no new features go out without instrumentation and no machine gets created without being monitored.
Datadog just scales with us. Great service and I highly recommend it to anyone not looking to reinvent the wheel with monitoring and instrumentation.
DatadogDatadog makes running a service with 800,000 unique users a month possible as a single developer/maintainer. I bought a separate monitor just to keep my datadog dashboards always visible and rely on triggers to keep watch over 20+ servers.
Highly recommended.
DatadogWe use datadog to monitor our servers and some application metrics. Easy to get started and scale to many servers. Datadog support engineers are always quick to respond to bugs and other challenges.
New RelicFree Heroku add-on. Not particularly useful for us. Rails profilers tend to do a better job at the app level. And I can never really figure out what’s going on with Heroku by looking at New Relic. I don’t know if we’re just not using New Relic correctly or if it really does just suck for our use case. But I guess some insight is better than none.
New RelicHow do you know what parts of the workflow need improvement? Measure it. With New Relic in place, we have graphs of our API performance and can directly see if a server or zone is causing trouble, and the impact of our changes. There’s no comparison between a real-time performance graph and “Strange, the site seems slow, I should tail the logs”.
DatadogWe just started looking into Datadog, but from what we see, it's like New Relic meets Loggly. It's really easy to plugin different services (like the one on this list) and get detailed analysis of what is happening on your servers and services. It makes tracking down sparse and difficult to understand problems possible.
New RelicWe monitor and troubleshoot our app's performance using New Relic, which gives us a great view into each type of request that hits our servers. It also gives us a nice weekly summary of error rates and response times so that we know how well we've done in the past week.
DatadogMonitoring day-to-day operations of multiple high-performance computing assets distributed across several networks. Monitoring vendor provided data and setting up alerts when things do not show up on time.
DatadogDatadog was used as an agent for monitoring and as for the statsd daemon included. This way we are able to have automated system stats and include whatever other metrics we want to track.
New RelicI'm trying to wring more instrumentation out of New Relic as it pertains to Rack, but for the time being, New Relic is monitoring/alerting uptime and some basic performance metrics.
SignalFxWe use SignalFx to monitor all of SignalFx.. that include the entire stack from core services like Cassandra and AWS EC2 up through custom application metrics from SignalFx itself.
New RelicJust like we care about errors, we care about metrics - especially around performance. You'd be crazy not to use it - and not surprisingly, it's a one-click add-on in Heroku.
DatadogDatadog is used because it has a great free tier and it provides us with great insights and integrations into our infrastructure and tools.
DatadogPowerful all-in-one monitoring solution as a service. Good integration with AWS. Very affordable price for small-scale startups.