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New Relic vs Prometheus: What are the differences?
New Relic and Prometheus are two popular monitoring and observability tools used in the software industry. Let's explore the key differences between New Relic and Prometheus:
Architecture: New Relic follows a centralized architecture, collecting data from monitored systems and sending it to the cloud. Agents are installed on systems for data collection. Prometheus, on the other hand, has a decentralized architecture, deploying exporters on each system to scrape metrics directly for storage and analysis.
Data Collection: New Relic supports diverse data collection methods, with built-in instrumentation for programming languages and frameworks. It offers automatic discovery and monitoring of application components, collecting metrics, traces, logs, and events. Prometheus focuses on metric collection through a pull-based model, scraping metrics from exporters at regular intervals. It also supports custom instrumentation through client libraries.
Scalability: New Relic is designed for large-scale deployments, offering automatic scaling in its cloud infrastructure. It efficiently handles data collection from numerous systems. Prometheus requires manual scaling and configuration as a self-hosted solution, relying on hardware and resources allocated to the server and exporters. Additional Prometheus instances can be deployed for workload distribution.
Data Storage and Retention: New Relic stores monitoring data in the cloud, optimized for query performance. It offers long-term retention options and features like aggregation, filtering, and alerting. Prometheus stores metrics in a local time-series database, allowing configurable retention periods. It focuses on storing raw data for detailed analysis rather than aggregating it.
Alerting and Visualization: New Relic provides robust alerting with customizable thresholds and real-time notification mechanisms. It integrates with popular communication channels and offers visualization tools like dashboards and reports. Prometheus has a built-in alerting system based on metric thresholds and supports alerts via different channels. It provides a basic web interface for visualization and querying, often used with Grafana for advanced visualization.
Integration and Ecosystem: New Relic has a rich integration ecosystem, offering APIs, SDKs, and a marketplace for third-party extensions. It integrates with various technologies such as cloud platforms, databases, and messaging systems. Prometheus also has a growing ecosystem, with integrations and exporters for popular systems and services. It has a strong integration with Grafana, which enhances visualization and querying capabilities.
In summary, New Relic offers cloud-based monitoring, extensive data collection, and scalability for large-scale deployments. Prometheus excels in self-managed and containerized environments, with its decentralized architecture and real-time monitoring capabilities.
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.
Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.
Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?
What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?
Regards, Sunil.
If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.
Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.
Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose
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.
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 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
- Server Resources Monitoring11
- SQL Analysis11
- Transaction Tracing9
- Azure Add-on8
- Apdex Scores8
- Detailed reports7
- Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network7
- Application Response Times6
- Performance of External Services6
- Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting6
- Error Analysis6
- JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)5
- Most Time Consuming Transactions5
- Top Database Operations4
- Easy to use4
- Browser Transaction Tracing4
- Application Map3
- Weekly Performance Email3
- Custom Dashboards3
- Pagoda Box integration3
- App Speed Index2
- Easy to setup2
- Background Jobs Transaction Analysis2
- 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
- Cost0
- Exceptions0
- Price0
- Proce0
Pros of Prometheus
- Powerful easy to use monitoring47
- Flexible query language38
- Dimensional data model32
- Alerts27
- Active and responsive community23
- Extensive integrations22
- Easy to setup19
- Beautiful Model and Query language12
- Easy to extend7
- Nice6
- Written in Go3
- Good for experimentation2
- Easy for monitoring1
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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
Cons of Prometheus
- Just for metrics12
- Bad UI6
- Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints6
- Not easy to configure and use4
- Supports only active agents3
- Written in Go2
- TLS is quite difficult to understand2
- Requires multiple applications and tools2
- Single point of failure1
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