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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.