Grafana vs New Relic vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

Introduction

Grafana, New Relic, and Prometheus are popular monitoring and observability tools used to collect and visualize metrics, logs, and traces in real-time. While they serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between them that make each tool unique.

1. Data Sources: Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics tool that can connect to various data sources, including databases, cloud platforms, and monitoring systems like Prometheus and New Relic. New Relic, on the other hand, is a full-stack observability platform that collects data directly from applications using its agents. Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting toolkit that primarily focuses on scraping metrics from predefined endpoints and does not support as many data sources as Grafana or New Relic.

2. Integration and Visualization: Grafana provides a user-friendly interface to integrate multiple data sources and create customizable dashboards, allowing users to visualize and analyze data in various formats like graphs, tables, and heatmaps. New Relic offers its own visualization tools that are tightly integrated with its platform and provide out-of-the-box dashboards and visualizations tailored for specific use cases. Prometheus, on the other hand, relies on third-party visualization tools like Grafana to create visualizations and dashboards.

3. Alerting and Notification: Grafana supports alerting based on predefined thresholds or complex queries, allowing users to get notified when specific conditions are met. New Relic also provides advanced alerting capabilities, including anomaly detection and dynamic baselining, to proactively identify and notify about potential issues. Prometheus has basic alerting capabilities but requires external integrations like Grafana or alert manager for more advanced alerting and notification functionality.

4. Scalability and Performance: Grafana is highly scalable and can handle large amounts of data and high traffic with the help of clustering and load balancing. New Relic is designed to handle massive amounts of data from distributed applications and supports dynamic infrastructure scaling. Prometheus is known for its lightweight architecture, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments, but it may face challenges with scalability and performance when dealing with a large number of targets or high ingestion rates.

5. Community Support and Ecosystem: Grafana has a vibrant open-source community and a wide range of plugins and integrations available, making it highly customizable and extensible. New Relic has an extensive ecosystem of integrations and partners, providing additional functionalities and easy integration with various technologies. Prometheus also has an active community and a growing ecosystem of exporters and integrations but may have fewer options compared to Grafana or New Relic.

6. Pricing and Licensing: Grafana is free and open-source software with enterprise features available under a paid license. New Relic offers a range of pricing plans based on the features and level of support required. Prometheus is open-source and free, making it a cost-effective choice for organizations, but additional costs may be incurred for hosting and managing the infrastructure.

In Summary, Grafana is a highly customizable visualization tool with extensive data source support, New Relic offers a full-stack observability platform with built-in visualization and advanced alerting capabilities, and Prometheus is a lightweight monitoring and alerting toolkit with a focus on scraping metrics from predefined endpoints.