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Datadog vs New Relic: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Datadog and New Relic, two popular monitoring and analytics platforms commonly used in the IT industry.
Pricing Model: One of the main differences between Datadog and New Relic is their pricing model. Datadog offers a flexible pricing structure based on metrics, which allows users to pay only for the data they actually use. On the other hand, New Relic follows a more traditional pricing model based on the number of hosts or containers being monitored. This can be advantageous for smaller businesses that have fewer resources to monitor but can become costly for larger organizations with a complex infrastructure.
Alerting and Notification Mechanisms: When it comes to alerting and notifications, Datadog provides more flexibility and customization options compared to New Relic. Datadog allows users to set up highly configurable alerts with granular conditions and actions. It also offers various integrations with third-party tools, making it easier to send notifications to different endpoints. New Relic, while still offering alerting capabilities, may not have the same level of flexibility and third-party integrations as Datadog.
Monitoring Capabilities: Both Datadog and New Relic offer comprehensive monitoring capabilities, but they excel in different areas. Datadog is known for its strong infrastructure monitoring capabilities, providing deep insights into system performance, metrics, and logs. It also offers extensive support for cloud-based environments, making it a popular choice for DevOps teams. On the other hand, New Relic specializes in application performance monitoring (APM), offering powerful tools for profiling and troubleshooting code-level performance issues.
User Interface and Ease of Use: The user interface and ease of use can be subjective factors, but overall, Datadog is often praised for its intuitive and user-friendly interface. It offers a visually appealing dashboard with drag-and-drop functionality for creating custom views. New Relic, on the other hand, may have a steeper learning curve and a more technical interface. However, some users prefer New Relic's interface for its extensive customization options and advanced features.
Community and Integrations: Datadog has a large and active community, which provides a wealth of resources, plugins, and integrations. It has a marketplace where users can find and share custom integrations with various tools and services. New Relic also has a community and integrations, but it may not have the same level of diversity and active development as Datadog.
Extensibility and Ecosystem: Datadog has built a strong ecosystem by offering a wide range of integrations and partnerships with other technology providers. This allows users to extend the functionality of Datadog and integrate it with their existing tools and workflows. New Relic also offers integrations, but the extensibility and ecosystem may not be as robust as Datadog.
In summary, the key differences between Datadog and New Relic can be summarized as follows: Datadog offers flexible pricing based on metrics, has advanced alerting and notification mechanisms, excels in infrastructure monitoring, and has an intuitive user interface. On the other hand, New Relic follows a traditional pricing model, specializes in application performance monitoring, may have a steeper learning curve, and may not have the same level of extensibility and ecosystem as Datadog.
Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.
Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS
Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure
Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server
Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.
Please advise on the above. Thanks!
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.
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.
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