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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.
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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