AppSignal vs New Relic vs Scout

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AppSignal

97
98
+ 1
80
New Relic

20.8K
8.6K
+ 1
1.9K
Scout

83
86
+ 1
21

AppSignal vs New Relic vs Scout: What are the differences?

Introduction

When comparing AppSignal, New Relic, and Scout for monitoring applications, there are key differences that can help you make an informed decision on which tool to choose.

  1. Ease of Use: AppSignal stands out in terms of ease of use with its user-friendly interface and straightforward setup process. New Relic also offers a user-friendly interface, but it may have a steeper learning curve compared to AppSignal. Scout, on the other hand, falls short in terms of ease of use, as it may require more configuration and setup time.

  2. Customization Options: New Relic provides a high level of customization for monitoring applications, allowing users to tailor the tool to their specific needs. AppSignal offers some customization options but may not be as extensive as New Relic. Scout, on the other hand, has limited customization capabilities, which may restrict users in certain scenarios.

  3. Cost: AppSignal is often considered a more cost-effective option compared to New Relic, making it an attractive choice for budget-conscious users. New Relic, while offering advanced features, can be more expensive, especially for larger organizations. Scout falls somewhere in between, offering competitive pricing with a balance of features.

  4. Alerting and Notification Systems: New Relic provides robust alerting and notification systems, allowing users to set up customized alerts based on specific metrics and thresholds. AppSignal also offers alerting features, but they may not be as advanced as those in New Relic. Scout may have limited alerting capabilities, which could be a drawback for users looking for comprehensive monitoring.

  5. Plugin Ecosystem: New Relic has a vast plugin ecosystem, providing additional capabilities and integrations for users to enhance their monitoring experience. AppSignal may have a smaller plugin ecosystem in comparison, limiting the additional features available. Scout, while offering some plugins, may not have as extensive an ecosystem as New Relic.

  6. Community Support: New Relic boasts a large and active community of users and developers, providing valuable resources, forums, and support for users. AppSignal also has a supportive community, but it may not be as extensive as New Relic's. Scout, on the other hand, may have a smaller community presence, which could impact the availability of resources and support.

Summary

In summary, when considering AppSignal, New Relic, and Scout for application monitoring, key differences include ease of use, customization options, cost, alerting and notification systems, plugin ecosystem, and community support.

Advice on AppSignal, New Relic, and Scout
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 · 339.3K 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 AppSignal, New Relic, and Scout
Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 3 upvotes · 234.9K 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 · 437.1K 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 AppSignal
Pros of New Relic
Pros of Scout
  • 15
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Logs Errors
  • 7
    Tracks performance
  • 7
    Elixir support out of the box
  • 7
    Support Elixir
  • 6
    Profiles Ruby Memory Usage
  • 5
    In App Customer support via chat
  • 5
    Great UI
  • 4
    Affordable, holistic, All-in-One solution for Rails
  • 4
    Custom metrics
  • 4
    GIT Integration
  • 4
    Cheapest option
  • 4
    Anomaly detection
  • 415
    Easy setup
  • 344
    Really powerful
  • 245
    Awesome visualization
  • 194
    Ease of use
  • 151
    Great ui
  • 106
    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
    SQL Analysis
  • 11
    Server Resources Monitoring
  • 9
    Transaction Tracing
  • 8
    Apdex Scores
  • 8
    Azure Add-on
  • 7
    Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network
  • 7
    Detailed reports
  • 6
    Performance of External Services
  • 6
    Error Analysis
  • 6
    Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting
  • 6
    Application Response Times
  • 5
    Most Time Consuming Transactions
  • 5
    JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)
  • 4
    Browser Transaction Tracing
  • 4
    Top Database Operations
  • 4
    Easy to use
  • 3
    Application Map
  • 3
    Weekly Performance Email
  • 3
    Pagoda Box integration
  • 3
    Custom Dashboards
  • 2
    Easy to setup
  • 2
    Background Jobs Transaction Analysis
  • 2
    App Speed Index
  • 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
    Time Comparisons
  • 1
    Access to Performance Data API
  • 1
    Incident Detection and Alerting
  • 1
    Best of the best, what more can you ask for
  • 1
    Best monitoring on the market
  • 1
    Rails integration
  • 1
    Free
  • 0
    Proce
  • 0
    Price
  • 0
    Exceptions
  • 0
    Cost
  • 8
    Easy setup
  • 5
    Plugins
  • 3
    Affordable
  • 1
    Custom Scopes
  • 1
    GIT Integration
  • 1
    Local Developer Tracing
  • 1
    Profiles Ruby Memory Usage
  • 1
    Heroku Integration

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Cons of AppSignal
Cons of New Relic
Cons of Scout
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 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
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      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      What is AppSignal?

      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.

      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 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.

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      Blog Posts

      Oct 24 2019 at 7:43PM

      AppSignal

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      Jul 9 2019 at 7:22PM

      Blue Medora

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      Jul 2 2019 at 9:34PM

      Segment

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      Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
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