New Relic vs PagerDuty

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

New Relic

20.7K
8.5K
+ 1
1.9K
PagerDuty

1K
694
+ 1
119
Add tool

New Relic vs PagerDuty: What are the differences?

  1. Pricing Model: New Relic offers a flexible pricing model based on the number of hosts or containers being monitored, allowing users to scale their usage as needed. On the other hand, PagerDuty follows a user-based pricing model, where the cost is determined by the number of users accessing the system. This difference in pricing models allows organizations to choose the most suitable option based on their specific needs and budget.

  2. Focus of Monitoring: New Relic primarily focuses on application performance monitoring (APM) and provides comprehensive visibility into the performance of web and mobile applications. It offers features like real-time monitoring, code-level diagnostics, and precise application metrics. In contrast, PagerDuty is a incident management platform that focuses on real-time alerting and incident response. It centralizes alerts from various sources and enables efficient incident resolution through automated processes.

  3. Alerting Capabilities: New Relic provides flexible alerting capabilities, allowing users to set up custom alerts based on specific metrics and thresholds. It supports multiple notification channels, such as email and SMS, to ensure that the right people are notified promptly. PagerDuty, on the other hand, offers advanced alerting and on-call scheduling features. It includes options like phone calls and push notifications for critical alerts, and also provides escalation policies to ensure that alerts are routed to the right person or team based on predefined rules.

  4. Integration Ecosystem: New Relic offers a wide range of integrations with popular third-party tools and services, such as AWS, Azure, and Slack. This enables users to correlate performance data from different sources and get a holistic view of their environment. PagerDuty also provides integrations with various monitoring, collaboration, and ticketing tools to facilitate seamless incident management. Its integration capabilities allow teams to enhance their existing workflows and streamline their incident response processes.

  5. Visualization and Reporting: New Relic provides interactive and customizable dashboards that enable users to visualize and analyze performance data in real-time. It also offers reporting features that allow users to generate detailed reports on application performance, response times, error rates, and more. On the other hand, PagerDuty focuses more on providing actionable insights rather than visualizations. It offers incident analytics and trend analysis to help teams identify patterns and make data-driven decisions to improve incident management.

  6. Community and Support: New Relic has a vibrant community of users and provides extensive documentation, forums, and knowledge bases to support users in troubleshooting and optimizing their applications. It also offers different levels of support plans, including 24/7 technical support, to ensure that users get timely assistance when needed. PagerDuty also has an active community and provides resources like webinars, events, and customer forums. It offers various support plans, including a dedicated customer success manager, to cater to the specific needs of organizations.

In summary, New Relic and PagerDuty have key differences in their pricing models, focus of monitoring, alerting capabilities, integration ecosystems, visualization and reporting features, and community and support offerings. Organizations can choose between these tools based on their specific requirements for application performance monitoring and incident management.

Advice on New Relic and PagerDuty
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 · 306.7K 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
Michael Aldridge
Systems Engineer at BetterHelp · | 4 upvotes · 76.7K views
Needs advice
on
PagerDutyPagerDuty
and
SquadcastSquadcast

I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.

See more
Replies (2)
Chris Riley
Software Architect at Fixate IO · | 3 upvotes · 33.6K views
Recommends
on
VictorOpsVictorOps

Disclosure I work at Splunk and VictorOps is a Splunk product. But I would suggest in addition to trying the others adding VO to your list. It's important to note that some of the tools are designed as Incident Response tools, others started as mass notification tools. For on-call stick to those designed for incident response.

See more
Piyush Shrivastava
FrontEndDev at Transfin · | 2 upvotes · 21.4K views
Recommends
on
SquadcastSquadcast

I would say to use Squadcast, the configuration is easy, provides a lot of features such as war room, RCA tracking postmortem, RBAC and they are quick to add features on request as well, recently I asked for custom on call reminders and I am sure they will add it really soon.

See more
Decisions about New Relic and PagerDuty
Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 3 upvotes · 208.7K 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.

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 · 404.9K 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
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of New Relic
Pros of PagerDuty
  • 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
  • 55
    Just works
  • 23
    Easy configuration
  • 14
    Awesome alerting hub
  • 11
    Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management
  • 9
    User-customizable alerting modes
  • 4
    Awesome tool for alerting and monitoring. Love it
  • 3
    Most reliable out of the three and it isn't even close

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of New Relic
Cons of PagerDuty
  • 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
  • 7
    Expensive
  • 3
    Ugly UI

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

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 PagerDuty?

PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from your monitoring tools, gives you an overall view of all of your monitoring alarms, and alerts an on duty engineer if there's a problem.

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

What companies use New Relic?
What companies use PagerDuty?
See which teams inside your own company are using New Relic or PagerDuty.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

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

What tools integrate with New Relic?
What tools integrate with PagerDuty?

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
2332
Jul 2 2019 at 9:34PM

Segment

Google AnalyticsAmazon S3New Relic+25
10
6736
Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

Twilio SendGrid

GitHubDockerKafka+10
11
9938
GitHubGitPython+22
17
14199
What are some alternatives to New Relic and PagerDuty?
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!
AppDynamics
AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.
Splunk
It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
Airbrake
Airbrake collects errors for your applications in all major languages and frameworks. We alert you to new errors and give you critical context, trends and details needed to find and fix errors fast.
Prometheus
Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.
See all alternatives