Honeycomb vs New Relic

Overview

New Relic

Stacks22.7K

Followers8.7K

Votes1.9K

Honeycomb

Stacks80

Followers112

Votes8

Honeycomb vs New Relic: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Honeycomb and New Relic

Data Sampling: One major difference between Honeycomb and New Relic is their approach to data sampling. Honeycomb offers full-fidelity event data, allowing users to capture and analyze every event in their system, resulting in accurate insights. On the other hand, New Relic employs sampling techniques which reduce the volume of data collected and may lead to the loss of important details.
Query Flexibility: Honeycomb provides a more flexible querying experience compared to New Relic. With Honeycomb, users can refine their queries using boolean operators, nested conditions, and regular expressions, enabling them to investigate specific events and behaviors effectively. In contrast, New Relic's querying capabilities are relatively limited, restricting users from performing complex filtering and analysis.
Distributed Tracing: Honeycomb has a strong focus on distributed tracing, allowing users to gain visibility into the entire lifecycle of a request as it flows through various microservices and components. This tracing capability enables pinpointing performance bottlenecks and diagnosing issues in a distributed system. New Relic offers some distributed tracing features but may not be as comprehensive as Honeycomb.
Real-time Analysis: Honeycomb provides real-time analysis and visualization of event data, allowing users to monitor and react to changes in their system in real-time. New Relic, on the other hand, may have some latency in data processing, which can result in some delay in getting up-to-date insights.
User Interface: The user interface (UI) of Honeycomb has a more intuitive and user-friendly design compared to New Relic. Honeycomb's UI provides clear navigation, intuitive visualizations, and easy-to-use query builders, making it easier for users to explore and understand their data. New Relic's UI, while functional, may be slightly less user-friendly and may require more effort to navigate and utilize effectively.
Pricing: Honeycomb and New Relic have different pricing models. Honeycomb follows a pay-as-you-go model, where users pay based on the volume of data processed. In contrast, New Relic has various pricing tiers based on the features and capabilities required, with different pricing structures for different levels of access and usage.

In summary, Honeycomb offers full-fidelity event data, flexible querying, comprehensive distributed tracing, real-time analysis, user-friendly UI, and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, while New Relic may employ data sampling, have limited querying capabilities, offer less comprehensive distributed tracing, may have some latency in analysis, have a slightly less user-friendly UI, and follows a tiered pricing structure.

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Advice on New Relic, Honeycomb

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	Honeycomb
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.	We built Honeycomb to answer the hard questions that come up when you're trying to operate your software–to debug microservices, serverless, distributed systems, polyglot persistence, containers, and a world of fast, parallel deploys.
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	High-performance querying against high-cardinality or sparse events.; Accepts any structured JSON objects with a write key.; Submit events via API.; Open source agents, log tailers, SDKs, and integrations.; Customizable high-performance query windows.; Customizable storage windows provide control over retention and costs.; Always have access to the the raw data behind query results and graphs.; Shared boards.; Individual and team query histories.; Triggers and notifications.; Secure Tenancy for data compliance.
Statistics
Stacks 22.7K	Stacks 80
Followers 8.7K	Followers 112
Votes 1.9K	Votes 8
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 Expensive 7 Visualizations aren't very helpful 5 Hard to understand why things in your app are breaking	Pros 3 BubbleUp + Heat maps 2 Powerful UI 2 High-Cardinality Data 1 Better Value
Integrations
AppHarbor Cloudability HP Cloud Compute cloudControl Papertrail Loggly Ducksboard Blitz Pivotal Tracker Red Hat OpenShift	JavaScript Ruby ExpressJS Slack NGINX PostgreSQL MySQL Python Golang AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

What are some alternatives to New Relic, Honeycomb?

Datadog

Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Detect, diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy.

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.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.

Stackify

Stackify offers the only developers-friendly innovative cloud based solution that fully integrates application performance management (APM) with error and log. Allowing them to easily monitor, detect and resolve application issues faster

Skylight

Skylight is a smart profiler for your Rails apps that visualizes request performance across all of your servers.

Librato

Librato provides a complete solution for monitoring and understanding the metrics that impact your business at all levels of the stack. We provide everything you need to visualize, analyze, and actively alert on the metrics that matter to you.

Keymetrics

PM2 is a production process manager for Node.js applications with a built-in load balancer. It allows you to keep applications alive forever, to reload them without downtime and to facilitate common system admin tasks.

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.

SignalFx

We provide operational intelligence for today’s elastic architectures through monitoring specifically designed for microservices and containers with: -powerful and proactive alerting -metrics aggregation -visualization into time series data

Related Comparisons

Honeycomb vs New Relic: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Honeycomb and New Relic

Data Sampling: One major difference between Honeycomb and New Relic is their approach to data sampling. Honeycomb offers full-fidelity event data, allowing users to capture and analyze every event in their system, resulting in accurate insights. On the other hand, New Relic employs sampling techniques which reduce the volume of data collected and may lead to the loss of important details.
Query Flexibility: Honeycomb provides a more flexible querying experience compared to New Relic. With Honeycomb, users can refine their queries using boolean operators, nested conditions, and regular expressions, enabling them to investigate specific events and behaviors effectively. In contrast, New Relic's querying capabilities are relatively limited, restricting users from performing complex filtering and analysis.
Distributed Tracing: Honeycomb has a strong focus on distributed tracing, allowing users to gain visibility into the entire lifecycle of a request as it flows through various microservices and components. This tracing capability enables pinpointing performance bottlenecks and diagnosing issues in a distributed system. New Relic offers some distributed tracing features but may not be as comprehensive as Honeycomb.
Real-time Analysis: Honeycomb provides real-time analysis and visualization of event data, allowing users to monitor and react to changes in their system in real-time. New Relic, on the other hand, may have some latency in data processing, which can result in some delay in getting up-to-date insights.
User Interface: The user interface (UI) of Honeycomb has a more intuitive and user-friendly design compared to New Relic. Honeycomb's UI provides clear navigation, intuitive visualizations, and easy-to-use query builders, making it easier for users to explore and understand their data. New Relic's UI, while functional, may be slightly less user-friendly and may require more effort to navigate and utilize effectively.
Pricing: Honeycomb and New Relic have different pricing models. Honeycomb follows a pay-as-you-go model, where users pay based on the volume of data processed. In contrast, New Relic has various pricing tiers based on the features and capabilities required, with different pricing structures for different levels of access and usage.

Honeycomb vs New Relic

Overview

Honeycomb vs New Relic: What are the differences?