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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Log Management
  4. Log Management
  5. New Relic vs Papertrail

New Relic vs Papertrail

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Papertrail
Papertrail
Stacks605
Followers378
Votes273
New Relic
New Relic
Stacks22.7K
Followers8.7K
Votes1.9K

New Relic vs Papertrail: What are the differences?

Key Differences between New Relic and Papertrail

New Relic and Papertrail are both popular software solutions used for monitoring and troubleshooting applications and servers. However, there are several key differences between the two:

  1. Feature Set: New Relic is a comprehensive application performance monitoring (APM) tool that provides detailed insights into application performance, user experience, and infrastructure monitoring. It offers features like transaction tracing, error analytics, and real user monitoring. On the other hand, Papertrail is primarily a log management tool that focuses on centralizing and analyzing log data from various sources. It offers features like real-time log search, alerts, and log archiving.

  2. Scope: New Relic provides monitoring capabilities for both applications and infrastructure. It can monitor the performance of applications running on various platforms and frameworks, as well as the underlying infrastructure components such as servers, databases, and cloud services. Papertrail, on the other hand, is specifically designed for log management and analysis and does not offer detailed insights into application performance or infrastructure monitoring.

  3. Deployment: New Relic is typically deployed as a software agent that runs alongside the application being monitored, collecting performance data directly from the application code. It provides libraries and plugins for various programming languages and platforms. Papertrail, on the other hand, is a cloud-based service that works by collecting log data from different sources, including log files, syslog, and cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Heroku.

  4. Cost Structure: New Relic follows a subscription-based pricing model, where the cost is based on the features and the number of monitored entities (e.g., applications, servers, databases). The pricing usually scales with the usage and the level of features required. Papertrail, on the other hand, offers a usage-based pricing model, where the cost is determined by the volume of log data ingested and stored. The pricing may vary based on the retention period and the storage capacity needed.

  5. Integration Ecosystem: New Relic has a rich ecosystem of integrations with various third-party tools and services. It offers pre-built integrations with popular frameworks, libraries, and cloud platforms, allowing users to leverage their existing tools and workflows. Papertrail also provides integrations with some third-party services but has a more limited ecosystem compared to New Relic.

In summary, New Relic is a comprehensive APM tool that provides detailed performance monitoring for applications and infrastructure, while Papertrail is a log management tool that focuses on centralizing and analyzing log data. New Relic has a wider scope and feature set, with more emphasis on application performance, while Papertrail is specifically tailored for log management. The deployment models, cost structure, and integration ecosystems also differ between the two.

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Advice on Papertrail, New Relic

Medeti
Medeti

Jun 27, 2020

Needs adviceonAmazon EKSAmazon EKSKubernetesKubernetesAWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)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
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
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

Papertrail
Papertrail
New Relic
New Relic

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

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.

Intuitive Web-based log viewer;Powerful command-line tools;Long-term archive (S3);REST API;Team-wide groups and searches;Automated export for tables and charts;Search alerts;Easy SQL analytics (Hadoop);Unlimited systems and users;Encrypted logging
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
Statistics
Stacks
605
Stacks
22.7K
Followers
378
Followers
8.7K
Votes
273
Votes
1.9K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 85
    Log search
  • 43
    Integrates with Heroku
  • 43
    Easy log aggregation across multiple machines
  • 37
    Simple interface
  • 26
    Backup to S3
Cons
  • 2
    Expensive
  • 1
    External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging
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
Integrations
Slack
Slack
Heroku
Heroku
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS
OpsGenie
OpsGenie
Librato
Librato
HipChat
HipChat
Engine Yard Cloud
Engine Yard Cloud
AppHarbor
AppHarbor
Cloudability
Cloudability
HP Cloud Compute
HP Cloud Compute
cloudControl
cloudControl
Loggly
Loggly
Ducksboard
Ducksboard
Blitz
Blitz
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers

What are some alternatives to Papertrail, New Relic?

Datadog

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!

Logmatic

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Raygun

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.

Loggly

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Logentries

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

AppSignal

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.

Graylog

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

AppDynamics

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

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

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