We performed a comparison between AppDynamics and New Relic based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: New Relic is the preferred choice over AppDynamics according to user reviews due to its simplicity, ease of use, and straightforward pricing. Users appreciate the in-depth application information, reliable monitoring, and accurate alert mechanisms provided by New Relic. The initial setup process is straightforward, and pricing is reasonable compared to competitors.
"What I like best about AppDynamics is that it's functional, particularly in APM in Java and .NET."
"Provides monitoring more around business processes versus just servers, applications, etc. E.g., with complex systems, where a business process passes across multiple applications, the business needs us to monitor the heath of the process, not just a segment of the application."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is its ability to track the transactions between different applications."
"Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality."
"It's good for a larger scale deployment such as what my company is working on."
"The solution saves time and cost."
"That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace."
"Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to receive in-depth information about applications. It can detect a lot of important information."
"They instrument up from the bottom to the top – every piece of code - they have a very perfect read of what’s being done, and how long it’s taking."
"It gives insights to non-technical people about what technical issues are most important, how much it impacts customers, and potentially, where we should be targeting our development teams when they have time."
"The simplicity of the dashboard is very good."
"It has helped us maintain a much higher uptime than we had previously."
"We are able to drill down and see what is going on in the system."
"One valuable feature is that the synthetic alert stays open until the issue is resolved. You can actually monitor whether your system is back up."
"Working with the solution is very easy. It's user-friendly."
"Installation and configuration can be very tough. An average user without specialized knowledge can't do this. You need to have DevOps and QA teams handle it. During installation, a lot of customers get stuck trying to track the database or the API part, and they have to contact customer support."
"Additional support for NextGen mobile platforms also needs to be high in the roadmap prioritizations"
"If it can be able to intelligently provide all the things we need to look at, from a data point of view, that would be very useful."
"The integration with cloud services is still pending with AppDynamics. We would like the product to be serverless."
"The GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice Dev or Ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue do not bubble up to the first screen you see."
"The QA and test environment need improvement."
"I would like to see more of a unified platform. They're very, very new on the server side, machine agents. I want them to be more mature in this area."
"I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard."
"One thing I'd like to see in any APM, especially New Relic, is the ability to use distributed transactions. When one microservice calls another, it calls another database and microservice. The entire data visualization layer will not be able to correlate from one microservice from end to end and return on that path. Distributed transactions would be a great addition that would make life simpler. Unfortunately, no APM has that end-to-end capability."
"The deployment process could be improved."
"The connectivity between legacy and newer cloud applications is not great."
"I would like to have storage monitoring. E.g., being able to monitor SANS, specifically protocols, like NFS and CIFS metrics."
"There were some settings we had issues with."
"There are times when you restart the engines and the servers have a unique ID for the host and you need to remove the server. It is difficult because some are on-premise and others are production hosts. Having downtime is not very good when updating. However, it is not a constant issue."
"They should bring the pricing down to be more competitive."
"New Relic APM could improve error debugging and the correlation with the logs. We are receiving some alerts or alarms but we need to correlate with the error log, but it is difficult if it is more than seven months retention period, it is hard to trace. We need this especially for getting historical information."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while New Relic is ranked 3rd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 152 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while New Relic is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of New Relic writes "Has a simple user interface and end-to-end monitoring and self-healing features". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, whereas New Relic is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, Elastic Observability, Grafana and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our AppDynamics vs. New Relic report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors and best Mobile APM vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitoring. We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace. Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log analytics into solution buy may consider in the future. We had AppD, Dynatrace, New Relic, and CA Wily all in house at the time of our evaluation. We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing. Between Dynatrace and New Relic, Dynatrace won based on the automation, integrated AI, support for "old" techs, and confidence we could eliminate multiple APM and infra monitoring tools.
I would not include products like BigPanda, MoogSoft, in this analysis. They are not monitoring solutions but event correlation solutions. You will need additional monitoring products to capture data and feed them. Having said that if you cannot consolidate tools you will likely need to purchase an event solution to make sense of all the alarms. We did evaluate these products but with Dynatrace AI did not feel the business value was there for the investment.
Here's a quick pro/con list on Dynatrace & New Relic from our analysis.
New Relic Pros: Insights is an awesome product and capability. Lots of capabilities and plugins to extend data collection. The APM dashboard is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Good training and documentation are available to support the product.
New Relic Cons: Requires lots of manual configurations to implement and support. Insights product requires an investment of time to achieve value. Licensing is a nightmare as there is virtually no transparency in what you are being charged for. Lack of solution to consolidate alerts across implementation other than significant investment in insights to manually achieve this.
Dynatrace Pros: Very simple to implement and maintain with out of the box automation which supports modern (cloud/Kubernetes) and "old" (mainframe). In-app chat is helpful. High integration of infra and APM data for full-stack observability and engineering. Topology and trace discovery is more reliable than other products or our CMDB. Synthetics are easy to set up for any user. AI-assisted problem analysis on the trace discovery streamlines troubleshooting. AI includes "events" in an analysis like VMotion, deployment events. Have not done yet but looking to leverage monitoring as code for a fully integrated and automated delivery pipeline. See keptn.sh open source project.
Dynatrace Cons: User SQL lacks some functions of NRQL for user analysis. Host, process, and service data is not available to query within the product. Alarm processing lacks some granular controls. The Plug-in library is less robust.
Good luck with your decision!
We are currently going through a paper-based analysis to select an Enterprise APM solution.
Our Contenders are
1. Dynatrace
2. Cisco(AppDynamics)
3. Broadcom DX-APM
Shortlisted based on existing relationships with other products and services they provide.
We discounted New Relic- despite their growing capability - as they are yet to enter the enterprise APM solution scene.
With regards to your response "We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing .." :
Will you be willing to expand on Appd - what was your experience and issues w.r.t licensing. These could help us with our evaluation. Much appreciated. Regards Adrian
Could you please share your requirements ? There are a lot tools can be added to the list. I spent almost 6 months to test and check many tools then I select eG enterprise.
Thanks