Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
New Relic vs Sentry: What are the differences?
What is New Relic? SaaS Application Performance Management for Ruby, PHP, .Net, Java, Python, and Node.js Apps. New Relic is the all-in-one web application performance tool that lets you see performance from the end user experience, through servers, and down to the line of application code.
What is Sentry? Cut time to resolution for app errors from five hours to five minutes. Sentry is an open-source platform for workflow productivity, aggregating errors from across the stack in real time. 500K developers use Sentry to get the code-level context they need to resolve issues at every stage of the app lifecycle.
New Relic belongs to "Performance Monitoring" category of the tech stack, while Sentry can be primarily classified under "Exception Monitoring".
Some of the features offered by New Relic are:
- Performance Data Retention
- Real-User Response Time, Throughput, & Breakdown by Layer
- App Response Time, Throughput, & Breakdown by Component
On the other hand, Sentry provides the following key features:
- Real-Time Updates: For the first time, developers can fix code-level issues anywhere in the stack well before users even encounter an error.
- Complete Context: Spend more time where it matters, rather than investing in low-impact issues.
- Integrate Everywhere: Drop-in integration for every major platform, framework, and language -- JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Node, Java, .NET, mobile.
"Easy setup", "Really powerful" and "Awesome visualization" are the key factors why developers consider New Relic; whereas "Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy", "Email Notifications" and "Open source" are the primary reasons why Sentry is favored.
Sentry is an open source tool with 21.2K GitHub stars and 2.42K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Sentry's open source repository on GitHub.
StackShare, Shopify, and Salesforce are some of the popular companies that use New Relic, whereas Sentry is used by reddit, StackShare, and Sentry. New Relic has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3143 company stacks & 566 developers stacks; compared to Sentry, which is listed in 1322 company stacks and 421 developer stacks.
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
- Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network7
- Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting6
- Performance of External Services6
- Detailed reports6
- Error Analysis6
- Application Response Times6
- JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)5
- Most Time Consuming Transactions5
- Easy to use4
- Browser Transaction Tracing4
- Top Database Operations4
- Application Map3
- Custom Dashboards3
- Pagoda Box integration3
- Weekly Performance Email3
- Easy to setup2
- App Speed Index2
- Background Jobs Transaction Analysis2
- Easy visibility2
- Real User Monitoring Overview1
- Time Comparisons1
- Access to Performance Data API1
- Free1
- Super Expensive1
- Incident Detection and Alerting1
- Best monitoring on the market1
- Rails integration1
- Worst Transactions by User Dissatisfaction1
- Real User Monitoring Analysis and Breakdown1
- Team Collaboration Tools1
- Metric Data Resolution1
- Metric Data Retention1
- Best of the best, what more can you ask for1
- Exceptions0
- Cost0
- Price0
- Proce0
Pros of Sentry
- Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy236
- 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
- Love it baby4
- Feedback form on error pages4
- Gitlab integration3
- Filter by custom tags3
- Super user friendly3
- Captures local variables at each frame in backtraces3
- Easy Integration3
- Performance measurements1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
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 Sentry
- Confusing UI12
- Bundle size4
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is New Relic?
What is Sentry?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use New Relic?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with New Relic?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+8
+8
+25
+12+29
+42+31
+22