Grafana vs New Relic: What are the differences?

Grafana and New Relic are both popular tools used for monitoring and visualizing data. Let's explore the key differences between them.

1. Data Collection and Source Compatibility: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including databases, APIs, logs, and more. It can integrate with multiple data sources simultaneously, allowing users to create dashboards using data from different sources. On the other hand, New Relic primarily collects data through agents installed on the target systems and does not have the same flexible compatibility with external data sources.

2. Alerting Capabilities: Grafana provides a robust alerting system that allows users to set up notifications based on customizable thresholds and conditions. Users can configure alerts to be sent via various channels like email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc. New Relic, on the other hand, has more advanced alerting features with powerful capabilities like anomaly detection, baseline alerting, and dynamic thresholds, offering more advanced and intelligent alerting options.

3. Built-in Features: Grafana is primarily focused on visualizing data and providing a customizable user interface to create and manage dashboards. It offers various panel types, charting options, and customization capabilities. New Relic, in addition to data visualization, provides additional features out-of-the-box, such as application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, and infrastructure monitoring, making it a comprehensive solution for application monitoring.

4. Community and Plugins: Grafana has a vibrant open-source community and a rich ecosystem of plugins and extensions, making it highly extensible. Users can leverage community-provided plugins and templates to enhance their dashboards and extend the functionality of Grafana. New Relic, on the other hand, has a more curated marketplace for integrations, plugins, and extensions compared to Grafana's open ecosystem.

5. Pricing and Licensing: Grafana is an open-source project with a flexible licensing model, making it free to use and suitable for organizations with budget constraints. While Grafana Enterprise offers additional features and support, the base version is available for free. New Relic, however, follows a commercial licensing model, and its pricing is based on the selected plan and the number of monitored entities. The commercial nature of New Relic may not be suitable for organizations seeking a purely open-source monitoring solution.

6. Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Grafana has a user-friendly interface and is relatively easy to get started with, thanks to its intuitive dashboard building and configuration options. It provides extensive documentation and widely available learning resources, making it accessible for users at various skill levels. New Relic, although offering a comprehensive set of features, can have a steeper learning curve due to its more complex setup and configuration, especially when it comes to advanced features like distributed tracing and APM.

In summary, Grafana offers compatibility with a wide range of data sources, customizable alerting, and a strong community of plugins, while New Relic provides a more comprehensive application monitoring solution with additional features like APM and distributed tracing.