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Grafana vs New Relic: What are the differences?
What is Grafana? Open source Graphite & InfluxDB Dashboard and Graph Editor. Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
What is New Relic? SaaS Application Performance Management for Ruby, PHP, .Net, Java, Python, and Node.js Apps. New Relic is the all-in-one web application performance tool that lets you see performance from the end user experience, through servers, and down to the line of application code.
Grafana and New Relic are primarily classified as "Monitoring" and "Performance Monitoring" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Grafana are:
- Create, edit, save & search dashboards
- Change column spans and row heights
- Drag and drop panels to rearrange
On the other hand, New Relic provides the following key features:
- Performance Data Retention
- Real-User Response Time, Throughput, & Breakdown by Layer
- App Response Time, Throughput, & Breakdown by Component
"Beautiful" is the primary reason why developers consider Grafana over the competitors, whereas "Easy setup" was stated as the key factor in picking New Relic.
Grafana is an open source tool with 29.3K GitHub stars and 5.55K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Grafana's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, New Relic has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3143 company stacks & 566 developers stacks; compared to Grafana, which is listed in 558 company stacks and 313 developer stacks.
Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:
- Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
- Able to display automation test results,
- System monitoring / Nginx API,
- Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.
Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.
You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.
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.
We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.
this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/
I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.
From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."
For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana
- Grafana based demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdTB2AcU4Sg
- Kibana based reporting screenshot: https://imgur.com/vuVvZKN
Kibana has predictions
and ML algorithms support, so if you need them, you may be better off with Kibana . The multi-variate analysis features it provide are very unique (not available in Grafana).
For everything else, definitely Grafana . Especially the number of supported data sources, and plugins clearly makes Grafana a winner (in just visualization and reporting sense). Creating your own plugin is also very easy. The top pros of Grafana (which it does better than Kibana ) are:
- Creating and organizing visualization panels
- Templating the panels on dashboards for repetetive tasks
- Realtime monitoring, filtering of charts based on conditions and variables
- Export / Import in JSON format (that allows you to version and save your dashboard as part of git)
I use both Kibana and Grafana on my workplace: Kibana for logging and Grafana for monitoring. Since you already work with Elasticsearch, I think Kibana is the safest choice in terms of ease of use and variety of messages it can manage, while Grafana has still (in my opinion) a strong link to metrics
After looking for a way to monitor or at least get a better overview of our infrastructure, we found out that Grafana (which I previously only used in ELK stacks) has a plugin available to fully integrate with Amazon CloudWatch . Which makes it way better for our use-case than the offer of the different competitors (most of them are even paid). There is also a CloudFlare plugin available, the platform we use to serve our DNS requests. Although we are a big fan of https://smashing.github.io/ (previously dashing), for now we are starting with Grafana .
I use Kibana because it ships with the ELK stack. I don't find it as powerful as Splunk however it is light years above grepping through log files. We previously used Grafana but found it to be annoying to maintain a separate tool outside of the ELK stack. We were able to get everything we needed from Kibana.
Kibana should be sufficient in this architecture for decent analytics, if stronger metrics is needed then combine with Grafana. Datadog also offers nice overview but there's no need for it in this case unless you need more monitoring and alerting (and more technicalities).
@Kibana, of course, because @Grafana looks like amateur sort of solution, crammed with query builder grouping aggregates, but in essence, as recommended by CERN - KIbana is the corporate (startup vectored) decision.
Furthermore, @Kibana comes with complexity adhering ELK stack, whereas @InfluxDB + @Grafana & co. recently have become sophisticated development conglomerate instead of advancing towards a understandable installation step by step inheritance.
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 Grafana
- Beautiful89
- Graphs are interactive68
- Free57
- Easy56
- Nicer than the Graphite web interface34
- Many integrations25
- Can build dashboards18
- Can collaborate on dashboards10
- Easy to specify time window10
- Dashboards contain number tiles9
- Click and drag to zoom in5
- Integration with InfluxDB5
- Open Source5
- Authentification and users management4
- Threshold limits in graphs4
- Simple and native support to Prometheus3
- It is open to cloud watch and many database3
- Alerts3
- You can visualize real time data to put alerts2
- You can use this for development to check memcache2
- Great community support2
- Plugin visualizationa0
- Grapsh as code0
Pros of New Relic
- Easy setup415
- Really powerful344
- Awesome visualization244
- Ease of use194
- Great ui151
- Free tier107
- 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
- Detailed reports7
- Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network7
- Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting6
- Performance of External Services6
- Error Analysis6
- Application Response Times6
- Most Time Consuming Transactions5
- JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)5
- Top Database Operations4
- Easy to use4
- Browser Transaction Tracing4
- Application Map3
- Weekly Performance Email3
- Custom Dashboards3
- Pagoda Box integration3
- App Speed Index2
- Background Jobs Transaction Analysis2
- Easy to setup2
- Time Comparisons1
- Access to Performance Data API1
- 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
- Free1
- Best of the best, what more can you ask for1
- Best monitoring on the market1
- Rails integration1
- Incident Detection and Alerting1
- Exceptions0
- Price0
- Cost0
- Proce0
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
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