New Relic vs Splunk

Overview

New Relic

Stacks22.7K

Followers8.7K

Votes1.9K

Splunk

Stacks772

Followers1.0K

Votes20

New Relic vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Introduction:

New Relic and Splunk are both popular tools used for monitoring and managing IT infrastructure and applications. While they have some similarities, there are key differences between the two.

Data Collection and Analysis: New Relic focuses on real-time application performance monitoring and offers easy-to-use, agent-based data collection. It provides deep insights into application performance metrics such as response times, error rates, and throughput. In contrast, Splunk is a log management and analytical tool that can ingest and analyze data from various sources, including logs, metrics, and events. It offers more flexibility in terms of data sources and provides powerful searching and reporting capabilities.
Scope and Use Case: New Relic is primarily designed for monitoring web applications and infrastructure performance. It helps developers and DevOps teams identify performance bottlenecks and optimize their web applications. Splunk, on the other hand, has a broader scope and can be used for different use cases such as IT operations management, security investigation, and business analytics. It allows users to correlate and analyze data from multiple sources to gain actionable insights.
User Interface and Visualization: New Relic offers a user-friendly and intuitive web-based interface with pre-built dashboards and visualizations. It provides out-of-the-box visibility into various performance metrics, making it easy to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues. Splunk's user interface is highly customizable and allows users to create their own dashboards and visualizations using search and reporting tools. It provides more flexibility in terms of data visualization but may require more configuration and expertise to get started.
Alerting and Notification: New Relic provides robust alerting capabilities, allowing users to set up threshold-based alerts and receive notifications via email, SMS, or chat tools. It offers integrations with popular incident management tools for seamless incident response. Splunk also offers alerting and notification features, but it goes beyond threshold-based alerts. Users can create complex alerting rules using search queries and correlation searches to detect anomalies or specific patterns in the data.
Integration with Third-party Tools: New Relic has a wide range of integrations with popular technologies and frameworks used in web application development. It provides plugins and APIs to easily integrate with tools such as Kubernetes, AWS, and Java frameworks. Splunk also offers a rich ecosystem of integrations and has extensive support for various data sources and logging formats. It provides connectors and add-ons for integrating with technologies like AWS, Azure, and popular security tools.
Scalability and Deployment Options: New Relic offers a cloud-based SaaS solution, which simplifies deployment and scalability. It provides automatic scaling and load balancing capabilities, allowing users to handle varying workloads. Splunk offers both on-premises and cloud-based deployment options. It provides more flexibility in terms of deployment models but requires users to manage and scale the infrastructure themselves.

In summary, New Relic focuses on real-time application performance monitoring with a user-friendly interface, while Splunk offers a broader scope with powerful data analysis and visualization capabilities. Their differences lie in the scope of use cases, data collection, analysis capabilities, and deployment options.

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Advice on New Relic, Splunk

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	Splunk
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.	It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
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	Predict and prevent problems with one unified monitoring experience; Streamline your entire security stack with Splunk as the nerve center; Detect, investigate and diagnose problems easily with end-to-end observability
Statistics
Stacks 22.7K	Stacks 772
Followers 8.7K	Followers 1.0K
Votes 1.9K	Votes 20
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 API for searching logs, running reports 3 Alert system based on custom query results 2 Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing 2 Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc 2 Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc Cons 1 Splunk query language rich so lots to learn
Integrations
AppHarbor Cloudability HP Cloud Compute cloudControl Papertrail Loggly Ducksboard Blitz Pivotal Tracker Red Hat OpenShift	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to New Relic, Splunk?

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!

Papertrail

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

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 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

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

Apache Spark

Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

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 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 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

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.

Related Comparisons

New Relic vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Introduction:

New Relic and Splunk are both popular tools used for monitoring and managing IT infrastructure and applications. While they have some similarities, there are key differences between the two.

Data Collection and Analysis: New Relic focuses on real-time application performance monitoring and offers easy-to-use, agent-based data collection. It provides deep insights into application performance metrics such as response times, error rates, and throughput. In contrast, Splunk is a log management and analytical tool that can ingest and analyze data from various sources, including logs, metrics, and events. It offers more flexibility in terms of data sources and provides powerful searching and reporting capabilities.
Scope and Use Case: New Relic is primarily designed for monitoring web applications and infrastructure performance. It helps developers and DevOps teams identify performance bottlenecks and optimize their web applications. Splunk, on the other hand, has a broader scope and can be used for different use cases such as IT operations management, security investigation, and business analytics. It allows users to correlate and analyze data from multiple sources to gain actionable insights.
User Interface and Visualization: New Relic offers a user-friendly and intuitive web-based interface with pre-built dashboards and visualizations. It provides out-of-the-box visibility into various performance metrics, making it easy to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues. Splunk's user interface is highly customizable and allows users to create their own dashboards and visualizations using search and reporting tools. It provides more flexibility in terms of data visualization but may require more configuration and expertise to get started.
Alerting and Notification: New Relic provides robust alerting capabilities, allowing users to set up threshold-based alerts and receive notifications via email, SMS, or chat tools. It offers integrations with popular incident management tools for seamless incident response. Splunk also offers alerting and notification features, but it goes beyond threshold-based alerts. Users can create complex alerting rules using search queries and correlation searches to detect anomalies or specific patterns in the data.
Integration with Third-party Tools: New Relic has a wide range of integrations with popular technologies and frameworks used in web application development. It provides plugins and APIs to easily integrate with tools such as Kubernetes, AWS, and Java frameworks. Splunk also offers a rich ecosystem of integrations and has extensive support for various data sources and logging formats. It provides connectors and add-ons for integrating with technologies like AWS, Azure, and popular security tools.
Scalability and Deployment Options: New Relic offers a cloud-based SaaS solution, which simplifies deployment and scalability. It provides automatic scaling and load balancing capabilities, allowing users to handle varying workloads. Splunk offers both on-premises and cloud-based deployment options. It provides more flexibility in terms of deployment models but requires users to manage and scale the infrastructure themselves.

New Relic vs Splunk

Overview