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Honeycomb

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Honeycomb vs New Relic: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Honeycomb and New Relic

  1. Data Sampling: One major difference between Honeycomb and New Relic is their approach to data sampling. Honeycomb offers full-fidelity event data, allowing users to capture and analyze every event in their system, resulting in accurate insights. On the other hand, New Relic employs sampling techniques which reduce the volume of data collected and may lead to the loss of important details.

  2. Query Flexibility: Honeycomb provides a more flexible querying experience compared to New Relic. With Honeycomb, users can refine their queries using boolean operators, nested conditions, and regular expressions, enabling them to investigate specific events and behaviors effectively. In contrast, New Relic's querying capabilities are relatively limited, restricting users from performing complex filtering and analysis.

  3. Distributed Tracing: Honeycomb has a strong focus on distributed tracing, allowing users to gain visibility into the entire lifecycle of a request as it flows through various microservices and components. This tracing capability enables pinpointing performance bottlenecks and diagnosing issues in a distributed system. New Relic offers some distributed tracing features but may not be as comprehensive as Honeycomb.

  4. Real-time Analysis: Honeycomb provides real-time analysis and visualization of event data, allowing users to monitor and react to changes in their system in real-time. New Relic, on the other hand, may have some latency in data processing, which can result in some delay in getting up-to-date insights.

  5. User Interface: The user interface (UI) of Honeycomb has a more intuitive and user-friendly design compared to New Relic. Honeycomb's UI provides clear navigation, intuitive visualizations, and easy-to-use query builders, making it easier for users to explore and understand their data. New Relic's UI, while functional, may be slightly less user-friendly and may require more effort to navigate and utilize effectively.

  6. Pricing: Honeycomb and New Relic have different pricing models. Honeycomb follows a pay-as-you-go model, where users pay based on the volume of data processed. In contrast, New Relic has various pricing tiers based on the features and capabilities required, with different pricing structures for different levels of access and usage.

In summary, Honeycomb offers full-fidelity event data, flexible querying, comprehensive distributed tracing, real-time analysis, user-friendly UI, and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, while New Relic may employ data sampling, have limited querying capabilities, offer less comprehensive distributed tracing, may have some latency in analysis, have a slightly less user-friendly UI, and follows a tiered pricing structure.

Advice on Honeycomb and New Relic
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogNew RelicNew Relic
and
SysdigSysdig

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?

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

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!

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Maik Schröder
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

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.

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Attila Fulop
Management Advisor at artkonekt · | 2 upvotes · 339.3K views

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

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/accounts/accounts-billing/new-relic-one-pricing-billing/new-relic-one-pricing-billing

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.

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Decisions about Honeycomb and New Relic
Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 3 upvotes · 234.9K views

Coming from a Ruby background, we've been users of New Relic for quite some time. When we adopted Elixir, the New Relic integration was young and missing essential features, so we gave AppSignal a try. It worked for quite some time, we even implemented a :telemetry reporter for AppSignal . But it was difficult to correlate data in two monitoring solutions, New Relic was undergoing a UI overhaul which made it difficult to use, and AppSignal was missing the flexibility we needed. We had some fans of Datadog, so we gave it a try and it worked out perfectly. Datadog works great with Ruby , Elixir , JavaScript , and has powerful features our engineers love to use (notebooks, dashboards, very flexible alerting). Cherry on top - thanks to the Datadog Terraform provider everything is written as code, allowing us to collaborate on our Datadog setup.

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Attila Fulop

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.

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Benoit Larroque
Principal Engineer at Sqreen · | 4 upvotes · 437.1K views

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

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Pros of Honeycomb
Pros of New Relic
  • 2
    Powerful UI
  • 2
    High-Cardinality Data
  • 2
    BubbleUp + Heat maps
  • 1
    Better Value
  • 415
    Easy setup
  • 344
    Really powerful
  • 245
    Awesome visualization
  • 194
    Ease of use
  • 151
    Great ui
  • 106
    Free tier
  • 80
    Great tool for insights
  • 66
    Heroku Integration
  • 55
    Market leader
  • 49
    Peace of mind
  • 21
    Push notifications
  • 20
    Email notifications
  • 17
    Heroku Add-on
  • 16
    Error Detection and Alerting
  • 13
    Multiple language support
  • 11
    SQL Analysis
  • 11
    Server Resources Monitoring
  • 9
    Transaction Tracing
  • 8
    Apdex Scores
  • 8
    Azure Add-on
  • 7
    Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network
  • 7
    Detailed reports
  • 6
    Performance of External Services
  • 6
    Error Analysis
  • 6
    Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting
  • 6
    Application Response Times
  • 5
    Most Time Consuming Transactions
  • 5
    JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)
  • 4
    Browser Transaction Tracing
  • 4
    Top Database Operations
  • 4
    Easy to use
  • 3
    Application Map
  • 3
    Weekly Performance Email
  • 3
    Pagoda Box integration
  • 3
    Custom Dashboards
  • 2
    Easy to setup
  • 2
    Background Jobs Transaction Analysis
  • 2
    App Speed Index
  • 1
    Super Expensive
  • 1
    Team Collaboration Tools
  • 1
    Metric Data Retention
  • 1
    Metric Data Resolution
  • 1
    Worst Transactions by User Dissatisfaction
  • 1
    Real User Monitoring Overview
  • 1
    Real User Monitoring Analysis and Breakdown
  • 1
    Time Comparisons
  • 1
    Access to Performance Data API
  • 1
    Incident Detection and Alerting
  • 1
    Best of the best, what more can you ask for
  • 1
    Best monitoring on the market
  • 1
    Rails integration
  • 1
    Free
  • 0
    Proce
  • 0
    Price
  • 0
    Exceptions
  • 0
    Cost

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Cons of Honeycomb
Cons of New Relic
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 20
      Pricing model doesn't suit microservices
    • 10
      UI isn't great
    • 7
      Expensive
    • 7
      Visualizations aren't very helpful
    • 5
      Hard to understand why things in your app are breaking

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    What is Honeycomb?

    We built Honeycomb to answer the hard questions that come up when you're trying to operate your software–to debug microservices, serverless, distributed systems, polyglot persistence, containers, and a world of fast, parallel deploys.

    What is New Relic?

    The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Honeycomb?
    What companies use New Relic?
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    What tools integrate with Honeycomb?
    What tools integrate with New Relic?

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    Blog Posts

    Jul 9 2019 at 7:22PM

    Blue Medora

    DockerPostgreSQLNew Relic+8
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    Segment

    Google AnalyticsAmazon S3New Relic+25
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    What are some alternatives to Honeycomb and New Relic?
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    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.
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