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New Relic vs Skylight: What are the differences?

Introduction

New Relic and Skylight are both popular application performance monitoring tools used by developers to track and improve the performance of their applications. However, there are key differences between the two tools that developers should be aware of before deciding which one to use.

  1. Integrations: New Relic offers a wide range of integrations with various technologies including Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and more. On the other hand, Skylight has limited integrations and mainly focuses on Ruby on Rails applications. This difference in integrations can impact the choice of tool based on the technology stack being used by the development team.

  2. User Interface: New Relic provides a user-friendly and intuitive interface that makes it easy for developers to navigate and access performance metrics. In comparison, Skylight has a simpler interface with a clean design, but it may lack some advanced features and customization options that are available in New Relic. Depending on the preferences of the development team, the user interface of each tool can play a significant role in the decision-making process.

  3. Cost: New Relic offers a range of pricing plans including a free tier for basic monitoring and paid plans with additional features and capabilities. Skylight, on the other hand, has a simpler pricing structure with a single plan that includes all features. Depending on the budget and requirements of the development team, the cost difference between New Relic and Skylight can be a deciding factor.

  4. Granularity of Data: New Relic provides detailed performance metrics and insights at a granular level, allowing developers to identify and troubleshoot performance issues effectively. Skylight also offers performance data, but it may not provide the same level of granularity and depth as New Relic. Depending on the complexity of the application and the specific performance metrics needed, the granularity of data provided by each tool can impact the decision.

In Summary, New Relic and Skylight differ in terms of integrations, user interface, cost, and granularity of data provided, which can affect the choice of tool for application performance monitoring.

Advice on New Relic and Skylight
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 · 310.3K 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 New Relic and Skylight
Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 3 upvotes · 210.9K 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 · 408.4K 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 New Relic
Pros of Skylight
  • 415
    Easy setup
  • 344
    Really powerful
  • 244
    Awesome visualization
  • 194
    Ease of use
  • 151
    Great ui
  • 107
    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
    Server Resources Monitoring
  • 11
    SQL Analysis
  • 9
    Transaction Tracing
  • 8
    Azure Add-on
  • 8
    Apdex Scores
  • 7
    Detailed reports
  • 7
    Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network
  • 6
    Application Response Times
  • 6
    Performance of External Services
  • 6
    Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting
  • 6
    Error Analysis
  • 5
    JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)
  • 5
    Most Time Consuming Transactions
  • 4
    Top Database Operations
  • 4
    Easy to use
  • 4
    Browser Transaction Tracing
  • 3
    Application Map
  • 3
    Weekly Performance Email
  • 3
    Custom Dashboards
  • 3
    Pagoda Box integration
  • 2
    App Speed Index
  • 2
    Easy to setup
  • 2
    Background Jobs Transaction Analysis
  • 1
    Time Comparisons
  • 1
    Access to Performance Data API
  • 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
    Free
  • 1
    Best of the best, what more can you ask for
  • 1
    Best monitoring on the market
  • 1
    Rails integration
  • 1
    Incident Detection and Alerting
  • 0
    Cost
  • 0
    Exceptions
  • 0
    Price
  • 0
    Proce
  • 11
    Beautiful UI
  • 8
    Sort by 'agony' - lists low hanging fruit fixes
  • 8
    Made by ember.js and rails core team members
  • 7
    Actionable analytics with concrete numbers
  • 6
    Free tier
  • 4
    Shows you repeat db queries
  • 3
    Great for production use
  • 2
    Setup in a minute
  • 1
    Weekly email w/performance trends
  • 1
    Full MVC profile

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Cons of New Relic
Cons of Skylight
  • 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
  • 1
    Comparing different timeframes is difficult

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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.

What is Skylight?

Skylight is a smart profiler for your Rails apps that visualizes request performance across all of your servers.

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What companies use New Relic?
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    What are some alternatives to New Relic and Skylight?
    Datadog
    Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
    AppDynamics
    AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    Airbrake
    Airbrake collects errors for your applications in all major languages and frameworks. We alert you to new errors and give you critical context, trends and details needed to find and fix errors fast.
    Prometheus
    Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.
    See all alternatives