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Amazon CloudWatch vs New Relic: What are the differences?
Amazon CloudWatch and New Relic are two popular monitoring and observability tools used in the world of cloud computing. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), while New Relic is a comprehensive observability platform designed to help organizations monitor and analyze application performance. Here are the key differences between them:
Data Sources: Amazon CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring AWS resources like EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 buckets, etc. It captures and analyzes metrics, logs, and events from these resources, providing insights into their health, availability, and performance. On the other hand, New Relic has extensible support for multi-cloud and hybrid environments, allowing businesses to monitor not only AWS resources but also on-premises, other cloud providers, and third-party services. It provides a broader range of integrations and can collect data from various applications, services, and components.
Alerting and Notification: Amazon CloudWatch offers basic alerting features, allowing users to set up alarms based on predefined thresholds for metrics. When the alarm state is triggered, an alert can be sent via various notification mechanisms, including email, SMS, and Amazon SNS. In contrast, New Relic provides a more advanced and flexible alerting system. It supports complex conditions, dynamic thresholds, multiple notification channels, and integration with popular incident management tools like PagerDuty and Slack. New Relic's alerting capabilities enable more fine-grained control over monitoring and alerting workflows.
Dashboards and Visualization: Both Amazon CloudWatch and New Relic offer customizable dashboards for data visualization and analysis. However, New Relic provides a more user-friendly and intuitive interface for building interactive dashboards and exploring metrics. It offers powerful charting capabilities, pre-built visualizations, and drag-and-drop functionality. Additionally, New Relic provides out-of-the-box dashboards and curated views for various use cases, saving time and effort in dashboard creation.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM): New Relic goes beyond traditional infrastructure monitoring by offering comprehensive APM capabilities. It provides deep insights into application performance, including transaction traces, code-level visibility, slowest SQL queries, error analysis, and more. With New Relic APM, developers can identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and troubleshoot application issues more efficiently. While Amazon CloudWatch has basic application monitoring capabilities, it does not offer the same level of detailed analysis and visibility as New Relic.
Automation and Integration: Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with other AWS services, making it easy to collect and analyze metrics within the AWS ecosystem. It seamlessly integrates with AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, and various other services. New Relic, on the other hand, provides extensive integration options beyond AWS. It supports popular programming languages and frameworks, offering SDKs, agents, and APIs for seamless data collection, automation, and integration with diverse environments and technologies.
Pricing and Cost Model: Amazon CloudWatch pricing is based on the number of metrics, events, alarms, and logs ingested, as well as the number of API requests made. While the pricing can vary based on the specific usage, CloudWatch offers a free tier to get started. New Relic pricing is based on the types of data sources monitored and the volume of data ingested. It offers different pricing plans and tiers based on the organization's needs. While both services have pricing calculators to estimate costs, New Relic typically comes at a higher price point compared to Amazon CloudWatch.
In summary, Amazon CloudWatch focuses on monitoring AWS resources, provides basic alerting and dashboard features, and is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem. New Relic, on the other hand, offers broader data source support, advanced alerting capabilities, intuitive visualization, in-depth APM capabilities, extensive integration options, and a comprehensive pricing model suited for multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
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 Amazon CloudWatch
- Monitor aws resources76
- Zero setup46
- Detailed Monitoring30
- Backed by Amazon23
- Auto Scaling groups19
- SNS and autoscaling integrations11
- Burstable instances metrics (t2 cpu credit balance)5
- HIPAA/PCI/SOC Compliance-friendly3
- Native tool for AWS so understand AWS out of the box1
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
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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
- Poor Search Capabilities1
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
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