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New Relic vs Rollbar vs Sentry: What are the differences?
Introduction
In the realm of application monitoring and error tracking, New Relic, Rollbar, and Sentry are popular choices for developers and businesses. While they all serve the purpose of helping monitor and improve application performance, there are key differences that set them apart.
Deployment and Integration: New Relic is known for its seamless deployment process and integration capabilities with a wide range of frameworks and platforms. Rollbar and Sentry also offer robust integration options but are slightly more specialized in certain technologies. Rollbar shines in tracking errors and exceptions in real-time for rapid response, while Sentry excels in its ability to provide detailed context and insights into issues, making it easier to troubleshoot effectively.
Feature Set: Each platform offers a unique set of features tailored to different needs. New Relic is comprehensive in its performance monitoring capabilities, providing detailed metrics on app performance, infrastructure monitoring, and more. Rollbar excels in error tracking with smart grouping and in-depth error data, while Sentry offers advanced features such as release tracking, session data, and user context to aid in debugging and resolving issues swiftly.
Scalability and Pricing: New Relic is often favored by larger enterprises due to its scalability and enterprise-grade features. Rollbar and Sentry cater well to small to medium-sized businesses with their flexible pricing plans and scalable solutions. Rollbar offers cost-effective pricing with a focus on error tracking, while Sentry provides value through its advanced debugging tools and insights at a competitive price point.
Community Support and Documentation: Rollbar and Sentry have gained popularity in developer communities for their strong community support and extensive documentation to help users get started quickly and troubleshoot effectively. New Relic also offers comprehensive documentation and support options, but Rollbar and Sentry stand out for their active community forums and user-generated content.
Summary
In Summary, New Relic, Rollbar, and Sentry differ in their deployment and integration capabilities, feature sets, scalability, pricing models, and community support, catering to a diverse range of needs in application monitoring and error tracking.
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.
I essentially inherited a Shopify theme that was originally created by an agency. After discovering a number of errors being thrown in the Dev Console just by scrolling through the website, I needed more visibility over any errors happening in the field. Having used both Sentry and TrackJS, I always got lost in the TrackJS interface, so I felt more comfortable introducing Sentry. The Sentry free tier is also very generous, although it turns out the theme threw over 15k errors in less than a week.
I highly recommend setting up error tracking from day one. Theoretically, you should never need to upgrade from the free tier if you're keeping on top of the errors...
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.
Sentry is so far the best in exception monitoring. It also has a decent rate limit and user limits for startups.
New relic is mostly performance monitoring but you have thousands of ways to optimise performance. With cloud based, serverless and auto-scaling solutions, performance within a limited RAM or disk space is not even a question, forget concern.
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 Rollbar
- Consolidates similar errors by impact74
- Centralize error management64
- Slack integration63
- Github integration58
- Usage based pricing47
- Insane customer support32
- Instant search23
- Heroku integration21
- Consolidate errors by OS18
- Great Free Plan15
- Trello integration15
- Flexible logging (not just exceptions)13
- Simple yet powerful error tracking tool11
- Multiple Language Support9
- Consolidate errors by browser7
- Easy setup6
- Query errors with RQL6
- Best rails exception handler5
- Deployment tracking is a nice free bonus5
- Awesome service5
- Simple and fast integration5
- Easy setup, friendly ui, demo, lots of integrations4
- Beat your users to the error report3
- Server-side + client-side3
- Errors Analysis3
- Clear and concise information.3
- Powerful3
- Mailgun integration2
- Easy integration with sails.js2
- Bitbucket integration2
- Clear errors on deploy or push1
- Easy Set up familiar UI that doesn't make you look dumb1
- Teams1
- Gitlab integration1
Pros of Sentry
- Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy237
- Email Notifications121
- Open source108
- Slack integration84
- Github integration71
- Easy49
- User-friendly interface44
- The most important tool we use in production28
- Hipchat integration18
- Heroku Integration17
- Good documentation15
- Free tier14
- Self-hosted11
- Easy setup9
- Realiable7
- Provides context, and great stack trace6
- Feedback form on error pages4
- Love it baby4
- Gitlab integration3
- Filter by custom tags3
- Super user friendly3
- Captures local variables at each frame in backtraces3
- Easy Integration3
- Performance measurements1
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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 Rollbar
Cons of Sentry
- Confusing UI12
- Bundle size4
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