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

Nagios

829
1.1K
+ 1
102
New Relic

20.8K
8.6K
+ 1
1.9K
Add tool

Nagios vs New Relic: What are the differences?

Introduction

Nagios and New Relic are two popular monitoring tools used for system and application monitoring. While both serve the same purpose, there are key differences between them. Below, we will outline the main differences between Nagios and New Relic.

  1. User Interface: Nagios has a traditional web-based user interface, which requires more manual configuration and setup. On the other hand, New Relic provides a more intuitive and user-friendly interface, offering a more streamlined and user-friendly experience.

  2. Ease of Installation and Configuration: Nagios requires more manual configuration and setup, making it more complex to install. New Relic, on the other hand, provides a more automated and simplified installation process, which makes it easier to set up and configure.

  3. Monitoring Capabilities: Nagios primarily focuses on infrastructure and network monitoring, allowing users to monitor servers, network devices, and services. New Relic, on the other hand, offers a broader range of monitoring capabilities, including application performance monitoring, end-user experience monitoring, and more.

  4. Scalability and Flexibility: Nagios can be highly customized and tailored to fit specific needs, making it highly scalable and flexible. New Relic, while providing some customization options, is more limited in terms of customization and may not offer the same level of scalability as Nagios.

  5. Alerting and Notification: Nagios offers extensive alerting and notification capabilities, allowing users to define sophisticated alerting rules and receive notifications via various channels. New Relic also provides alerting and notification features, but it may not offer the same level of flexibility and customization as Nagios.

  6. Pricing and Licensing: Nagios is an open-source tool, available for free, but it may require additional paid plugins for certain advanced features. New Relic, on the other hand, is a commercial tool that offers different pricing plans based on usage and features, which may not be suitable for all budgets.

In summary, Nagios and New Relic differ in terms of user interface, ease of installation and configuration, monitoring capabilities, scalability and flexibility, alerting and notification features, as well as pricing and licensing.

Advice on Nagios 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?

See more
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!

See more
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.

See more
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.

See more
Decisions about Nagios and New Relic
Matthias Fleschütz
Teamlead IT at NanoTemper Technologies · | 2 upvotes · 134.2K views
  • free open source
  • modern interface and architecture
  • large community
  • extendable I knew Nagios for decades but it was really outdated (by its architecture) at some point. That's why Icinga started first as a fork, not with Icinga2 it is completely built from scratch but backward-compatible with Nagios plugins. Now it has reached a state with which I am confident.
See more
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.

See more
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

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of Nagios
Pros of New Relic
  • 53
    It just works
  • 28
    The standard
  • 12
    Customizable
  • 8
    The Most flexible monitoring system
  • 1
    Huge stack of free checks/plugins to choose from
  • 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

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Nagios
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 public GitHub repository available -

    What is Nagios?

    Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

    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 Nagios?
    What companies use New Relic?
    Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
    Learn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Nagios?
    What tools integrate with New Relic?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    Blog Posts

    Jul 9 2019 at 7:22PM

    Blue Medora

    DockerPostgreSQLNew Relic+8
    11
    2376
    Jul 2 2019 at 9:34PM

    Segment

    Google AnalyticsAmazon S3New Relic+25
    10
    6884
    JavaScriptGitGitHub+33
    20
    2143
    GitHubPythonSlack+25
    7
    3224
    What are some alternatives to Nagios and New Relic?
    Zabbix
    Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    Icinga
    It monitors availability and performance, gives you simple access to relevant data and raises alerts to keep you in the loop. It was originally created as a fork of the Nagios system monitoring application.
    Solarwinds
    Developed by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today's dynamic IT environments, SolarWinds has a deep connection to the IT community.
    AppDynamics
    AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.
    See all alternatives