We performed a comparison between Datadog and New Relic APM based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: New Relic has a slight edge in this comparison. According to its reviewers, it is easier to set up and more reasonably priced than Datadog.
"The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents."
"Even if we don't end up using Datadog, it revealed problems and optimizations to us that weren't obvious before."
"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"Datadog's log aggregation is really helpful since it lets me and every other engineer on my team login, view, and share logs when we need to debug our application."
"The dashboards are great."
"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."
"The feature I have found most valuable is when I can reuse existing monitors and alerts for new dashboards."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to track and easy to follow."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"We like the performance of the product."
"It offers helpful user metrics so we can learn more about the user experience."
"The alert mechanism is quite accurate when something goes wrong in your system. For example, if you have hundreds of APIs on your server, and any of the APIs is not performing well, you get an alert. When there is a drop or change in the threshold value, the beauty of New Relic is that within a fraction of seconds, all the stakeholders who are configured in the New Relic system will get an alert. That's one good thing."
"The breakdown of the response time of different components and getting in-depth details of the slow component are the most valuable features. It is easy to use, and it gets the job done."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to receive in-depth information about applications. It can detect a lot of important information."
"I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"They should continue expanding and integrating with more third-party apps."
"Alerting timing should be improved to be more fine-tuned and exact."
"Data Dog captures the entire session and then provides it as a video player path, which gives more insight into what the user was doing. It's pretty impressive. New Relic does that, yet it only captures using a couple of screenshots, which is not very detailed since you are unable to see the entire user flow."
"There has been some problem with the agent, and it is just not working well. It is not able to record information with the application server. They have been able to fix the issue, but it took quite a long time. This is the main issue in the APM products and also in New Relic. The mobile application monitoring has been pretty difficult to set up and also quite expensive. It should be a little bit easier and cheaper. Because it is pretty difficult and expensive, many customers don't take it."
"It would be nice if there were pre-made dashboards."
"Documentation could be improved in New Relic APM, so users would have more clarity on configuring the dashboard. If New Relic gave better guidelines, users would find it easier to understand the metrics and features of New Relic APM. Another area for improvement is integration with Kubernetes. Currently, the process isn't user-friendly. It's challenging and lacks documentation for users to understand how to integrate New Relic APM with Kubernetes quickly. With multiple levels of Kubernetes dockers and other DBs on different clouds, it's tricky to gather all into New Relic APM on a single dashboard. What I'd like to see in the next version of New Relic APM is a single dashboard where you can easily view which applications fall under specific APMs. If there's a search feature where you can type in a keyword to find out if an APM is related to a particular application, that would be great."
"We would like a dashboard feature to be created for this product. This would allow us to monitor both the front and back-end of our UIs performance, and then report on it."
"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."
"I haven't come across any features that are lacking."
"The scalability can be improved."
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Management (APM) with 110 reviews while New Relic APM is ranked 3rd in Application Performance Management (APM) with 20 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while New Relic APM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "An out-of-the-box solution that allows you to quickly build dashboards". On the other hand, the top reviewer of New Relic APM writes "Provides a complete picture of what's happening and has an accurate alert mechanism". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, Splunk, Amazon CloudWatch and AppDynamics, whereas New Relic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, AppDynamics, Splunk and AWS X-Ray. See our Datadog vs. New Relic APM report.
See our list of best Application Performance Management (APM) vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Management (APM) 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