Overview

New Relic

Stacks21.0K

Followers8.7K

Votes1.9K

AppSignal

Stacks99

Followers100

Votes88

AppSignal vs New Relic: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare AppSignal and New Relic, two popular application monitoring tools. Both tools provide insights into the performance and health of web applications, but they have several key differences. Below are the 6 key differences between AppSignal and New Relic.

Pricing Model: AppSignal offers a flexible pricing model based on the number of hosts with a flat monthly fee per host. On the other hand, New Relic follows a complex pricing structure based on the number of users, data retention, and features used. This difference in pricing models can significantly impact the cost for organizations with varying infrastructure sizes.
Language Support: AppSignal supports a variety of programming languages, including Ruby, Elixir, JavaScript, and more. New Relic, on the other hand, offers support for a wide range of languages, including Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Node.js, and more. The difference in language support allows New Relic to cater to a broader range of development teams working with diverse tech stacks.
Ease of Setup: AppSignal has a straightforward and quick setup process, with minimal configuration required. It provides out-of-the-box instrumentation for popular frameworks, making it ideal for developers looking for a hassle-free monitoring setup. New Relic, while feature-rich, has a comparatively more complex setup process, often requiring additional configuration steps and manual instrumentation. This difference in ease of setup can affect the time and effort required to get started with monitoring.
User Interface: AppSignal offers a clean and intuitive user interface with a focus on simplicity. The interface provides essential monitoring data in a user-friendly manner, making it easy for developers to identify performance issues. New Relic, on the other hand, has a more extensive and visually complex interface, providing in-depth analysis and a wide range of customizable dashboards. The difference in user interface design caters to developers with varying preferences and needs.
Alerting and Notifications: AppSignal offers built-in alerting capabilities with customizable triggers and thresholds. It provides notifications via email and collaboration tools like Slack, ensuring teams stay informed about critical issues in real-time. In contrast, New Relic provides a robust alerting and notification system, allowing users to set up alerts based on specific conditions. It supports various notification channels, including email, SMS, and PagerDuty, providing flexibility in how teams receive alerts. This difference in alerting and notifications accommodates different monitoring workflows and preferences.
Third-Party Integrations: AppSignal offers integrations with popular third-party tools like GitHub, GitLab, and Trello, enabling seamless integration within existing development workflows. New Relic provides a wide range of integrations, including popular solutions for logging, deployment, issue tracking, and collaboration. This difference in third-party integrations extends the capabilities of the monitoring tool and facilitates better collaboration across teams.

In Summary, AppSignal and New Relic differ in their pricing model, language support, ease of setup, user interface design, alerting and notifications features, and third-party integrations. Organizations can choose the tool that aligns best with their specific requirements and preferences.

Advice on New Relic, AppSignal

Medeti

Jun 27, 2020

Needs adviceon

Amazon EKS

Kubernetes

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

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?

1.51M views1.51M

Comments

Benoit

Principal Engineer at Sqreen

Sep 17, 2019

Decided

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

457k views457k

Comments

Attila

Founder at artkonekt

Mar 24, 2020

Decided

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.

471k views471k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

New Relic	AppSignal
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.	AppSignal gives you and your team alerts and detailed metrics about your Ruby, Node.js or Elixir application. Sensible pricing, no aggressive sales & support by developers.
Performance Data Retention;Real-User Response Time, Throughput, & Breakdown by Layer;App Response Time, Throughput, & Breakdown by Component;App Availability Monitoring, Alerting, and Notification;Automatic Application Topology Mapping;Server Resource and Availability Monitoring;Error Detection, Alerting, & Analysis;JVM Performance Analyzer;Database Call Response Time & Throughput;Performance Data API Access;Code Level Diagnostics, Transaction Tracing, & Stack Trace Details;Slow SQL and SQL Performance Details;Real-User Breakdown by Web Page, Browser, & Geography;Track Individual Key Transactions;Mobile Features- Alerting, Summary Data, Overview Page, Topo Map, HTTP Requests, HTTP Error Summary, HTTP Error Detail, Versions, Carriers, Devices, Geo Map	Track errors; Performance Monitoring; Compare deploys. Monitor background jobs.; Lots of integrations.; Compare servers.; Alerts for you and your team.; API with access to your data and errors.; Beautiful clean interface.; Sensible pricing (pay for requests).; Unlimited users, apps, environments, hosts.; No aggressive sales team.; Stroopwafels.; Extensive documentation.; Dedicated, private slack support.
Statistics
Stacks 21.0K	Stacks 99
Followers 8.7K	Followers 100
Votes 1.9K	Votes 88
Pros & Cons
Pros 414 Easy setup 344 Really powerful 245 Awesome visualization 194 Ease of use 151 Great ui Cons 20 Pricing model doesn't suit microservices 10 UI isn't great 7 Visualizations aren't very helpful 7 Expensive 5 Hard to understand why things in your app are breaking	Pros 16 Easy setup 9 Logs Errors 8 Tracks performance 7 Support Elixir 7 Elixir support out of the box
Integrations
AppHarbor Cloudability HP Cloud Compute cloudControl Papertrail Loggly Ducksboard Blitz Pivotal Tracker Red Hat OpenShift	GitHub Heroku Phabricator Shortcut Jira GitLab Slack Trello Asana Intercom

What are some alternatives to New Relic, AppSignal?

Datadog

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AppDynamics

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Stackify

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Skylight

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Librato

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Keymetrics

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Dynatrace

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SignalFx

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Scout

Scout APM helps developers quickly pinpoint & resolve performance issues before the customer ever sees them. Spend less time debugging & more time building with a streamlined interface & tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code.