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New Relic vs Zipkin: What are the differences?
Introduction New Relic and Zipkin are both popular distributed tracing systems used for monitoring and troubleshooting applications. While they have similar purposes, there are some key differences between the two.
Data Collection Methods: One key difference between New Relic and Zipkin is their approach to data collection. New Relic primarily uses an agent-based approach, where an agent installed on the application server collects and sends data to the New Relic platform. On the other hand, Zipkin is based on an instrumentation approach, where developers need to add code instrumentation to their applications to capture tracing data.
Scalability and Performance: Another difference between New Relic and Zipkin lies in their scalability and performance capabilities. New Relic is a fully managed cloud-based solution that automatically scales to handle large volumes of data and offers high availability. In contrast, Zipkin is a self-hosted solution that requires manual setup and configuration, making its scalability and performance dependent on the resources available in the hosting environment.
Supported Programming Languages and Frameworks: New Relic provides support for a wide range of programming languages and frameworks out of the box, including Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, and more. It offers comprehensive language-specific instrumentation and provides integration with popular frameworks. On the other hand, Zipkin has a more extensible approach, allowing developers to implement custom instrumentation for various programming languages and frameworks.
Alerting and Monitoring Capabilities: New Relic offers advanced alerting and monitoring capabilities, allowing users to set up alerts based on specific conditions and thresholds. It provides a rich set of built-in monitoring dashboards and customizable reports for deep insights into application performance. In contrast, Zipkin focuses more on the core tracing capabilities and does not provide built-in alerting and monitoring features. Users may need to integrate Zipkin with other monitoring tools to achieve similar functionality.
Community and Ecosystem: New Relic has built a large community around its platform, with a wide range of resources, user forums, and knowledge base articles available. It also has an extensive ecosystem of third-party integrations and plugins for seamless integration with various tools and technologies. On the other hand, Zipkin, being an open-source project, also has an active community but with a relatively smaller userbase. While it has some integrations available, the ecosystem may not be as extensive as New Relic.
Pricing and Cost: The pricing models for New Relic and Zipkin are different. New Relic follows a subscription-based pricing model, where users pay based on the number of monitored hosts and the selected plan. The pricing includes all features, support, and infrastructure costs. Zipkin, being an open-source project, is free to use, but it requires manual setup and infrastructure provisioning, which may incur additional hosting costs.
In summary, New Relic and Zipkin offer distributed tracing capabilities but differ in their data collection methods, scalability, supported languages, alerting capabilities, community size, and pricing models. Users can choose based on their specific requirements, preference for a managed solution, or customization needs.
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 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 Zipkin
- Open Source10
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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 Zipkin
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