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AWS X-Ray

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AWS X-Ray vs New Relic: What are the differences?

  1. 1. Integration with specific AWS services: AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing system that allows developers to analyze and debug applications running in AWS environments. It seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and Elastic Load Balancing, providing detailed insights into the performance of these services and their interactions.

  2. 2. Support for multiple programming languages: AWS X-Ray supports a wide range of programming languages, including Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and .NET. This enables developers to instrument their applications in their preferred language, making it easier to trace requests and analyze performance across different services.

  3. 3. Automatic instrumentation: AWS X-Ray provides automatic instrumentation for AWS Lambda functions, making it effortless to trace requests and monitor performance without the need for manual code changes. This simplifies the troubleshooting process and reduces the overhead of implementing tracing in serverless applications.

  4. 4. Visual representation of request flows: AWS X-Ray allows developers to visualize the flow of requests through their distributed applications, providing a comprehensive view of how requests propagate across services. This helps identify bottlenecks, latency issues, and dependencies, enabling developers to optimize performance and improve overall application reliability.

  5. 5. Scalability and high availability: AWS X-Ray is designed to scale with the needs of the application and can handle large volumes of traces without compromising performance. It also provides high availability, ensuring that the tracing service is always accessible and reliable.

  6. 6. Cost-efficiency: AWS X-Ray offers a cost-efficient solution for distributed tracing, allowing developers to only pay for the traces they analyze. It provides detailed billing information, enabling better cost management and optimization of resources.

In Summary, AWS X-Ray offers seamless integration with AWS services, supports multiple programming languages, provides automatic instrumentation, offers visual request flow representation, ensures scalability and high availability, and is cost-efficient.

Advice on AWS X-Ray and New Relic
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 · 306K 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 AWS X-Ray and New Relic
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 · 404.3K 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 AWS X-Ray
Pros of New Relic
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 415
      Easy setup
    • 344
      Really powerful
    • 244
      Awesome visualization
    • 194
      Ease of use
    • 151
      Great ui
    • 107
      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
      Server Resources Monitoring
    • 11
      SQL Analysis
    • 9
      Transaction Tracing
    • 8
      Azure Add-on
    • 8
      Apdex Scores
    • 7
      Detailed reports
    • 7
      Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network
    • 6
      Application Response Times
    • 6
      Performance of External Services
    • 6
      Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting
    • 6
      Error Analysis
    • 5
      JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)
    • 5
      Most Time Consuming Transactions
    • 4
      Top Database Operations
    • 4
      Easy to use
    • 4
      Browser Transaction Tracing
    • 3
      Application Map
    • 3
      Weekly Performance Email
    • 3
      Custom Dashboards
    • 3
      Pagoda Box integration
    • 2
      App Speed Index
    • 2
      Easy to setup
    • 2
      Background Jobs Transaction Analysis
    • 1
      Time Comparisons
    • 1
      Access to Performance Data API
    • 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
      Free
    • 1
      Best of the best, what more can you ask for
    • 1
      Best monitoring on the market
    • 1
      Rails integration
    • 1
      Incident Detection and Alerting
    • 0
      Cost
    • 0
      Exceptions
    • 0
      Price
    • 0
      Proce

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of AWS X-Ray
    Cons of New Relic
      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

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      No Stats

      What is AWS X-Ray?

      It helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With this, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. It provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components.

      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.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use AWS X-Ray?
      What companies use New Relic?
      See which teams inside your own company are using AWS X-Ray or New Relic.
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      Blog Posts

      Jul 9 2019 at 7:22PM

      Blue Medora

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      Segment

      Google AnalyticsAmazon S3New Relic+25
      10
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      JavaScriptGitHubGit+33
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      GitHubPythonSlack+25
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      What are some alternatives to AWS X-Ray and New Relic?
      Dynatrace
      It is an AI-powered, full stack, automated performance management solution. It provides user experience analysis that identifies and resolves application performance issues faster than ever before.
      AppDynamics
      AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.
      Jaeger
      Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System
      Splunk
      It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
      ELK
      It is the acronym for three open source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash is a server‑side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a "stash" like Elasticsearch. Kibana lets users visualize data with charts and graphs in Elasticsearch.
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