

New Relic and Grafana are popular tools in monitoring and observability. New Relic's all-in-one monitoring capabilities give it an advantage in providing a unified view, while Grafana's flexibility and open-source nature offer a powerful alternative.
Features: New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities, offering a centralized view of the application stack. It has advanced analytics and automated anomaly detection. Grafana offers versatile data visualization options, integrates with a wide array of data sources, and provides extensive customization capabilities.
Room for Improvement: New Relic needs better integration options, more straightforward pricing structures, and enhanced user interface navigation. Grafana requires enhanced user management features, more intuitive configuration processes, and improved alerting capabilities.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: New Relic is recognized for relatively straightforward deployment and robust customer support. Grafana offers flexibility but requires more manual configuration and has a steeper learning curve, with user reviews indicating room for improved technical support.
Pricing and ROI: New Relic users report higher setup costs but feel that the comprehensive features justify the expense given their return on investment. Grafana users benefit from lower initial costs, especially its open-source option, yet might need additional investments for advanced functionality.
I identified over-provisioned servers and reduced my AWS monthly bill by 15%, which is a significant saving in terms of costs.
There is return on investment because since we reduced the downtime, we can definitely save a lot of money within that period.
There is a definite return on investment for New Relic, as we would not have invested in building its infrastructure if there were no returns.
After implementing New Relic, we have decreased staffing requirements while saving time and money.
The technical support team is very helpful with complex PromQL troubleshooting.
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
I do not use Grafana's support for technical issues because I have found solutions on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT helps me as well.
If I drop an email to them, they will respond quickly to my email.
Customer support from New Relic is very good, and we rarely need to create support tickets.
They are very polite and helped him out.
It is highly scalable and built on a big data architecture capable of ingesting trillions of data points.
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
We currently use New Relic for tens of thousands of developers and hundreds of teams within our organization, and we have not encountered any scalability issues.
It is also suitable for cloud native architectures, SaaS, or software as a service, and for high volume data ingestion also.
Regarding New Relic's scalability, it excels at the enterprise level for cloud integrations that can utilize tags.
When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
Even when handling millions of data points, the visualization layer remains responsive.
New Relic lags sometimes.
New Relic is stable based on my experience, as I have not seen any problems with the UI.
It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful.
Using real-time data, if there are any malicious patterns or something happening, they can identify those.
Because of the pricing model, organizations have experienced uncontrolled costs and were not able to afford New Relic.
In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it.
I purchased my Grafana Cloud subscription through the AWS Marketplace, which simplified my procurement process and allowed me to apply the cost towards my AWS committed spend.
Considering the features New Relic offers, the pricing or cost setup has not been a blocker for our budget.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for synthetic monitoring is that minions used to cost a lot.
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere.
You can check those metrics in the incident management tool by filtering the alert source as Grafana, and it helps in reducing production incidents because you can acknowledge and visualize the metrics from Grafana on time.
Using New Relic speeds up troubleshooting and resolution, giving us a clearer picture of where issues are, thus saving time and effort.
New Relic is very useful for teams that don't have much of a dedicated DevOps team but want to have observability for their platform, and it's an easy way to get started.
New Relic has positively impacted our organization by reducing errors, improving performance, and saving time.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| New Relic | 3.8% |
| Grafana | 2.7% |
| Other | 93.5% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 13 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 10 |
| Large Enterprise | 25 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 65 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 50 |
| Large Enterprise | 77 |
Grafana offers a customizable, user-friendly platform for robust data visualization and integration, enhancing real-time monitoring with extensive alerting and collaboration capabilities supported by an active open-source community.
Grafana stands out for its flexible dashboards and robust visualization options, integrating smoothly with tools like Prometheus. This open-source platform supports diverse environments, aiding in the visualization of IT infrastructure and business analytics. Its alerting system efficiently supports real-time monitoring. While it is praised for its community backing and cost-effectiveness, there is demand for better data aggregation, intuitive interfaces, and enhanced documentation compared to competitors such as Splunk. Simplification of configuration and the interface is sought, alongside improvements in machine learning and reporting features.
What are Grafana's most important features?Grafana is implemented widely across industries for monitoring IT infrastructure and visualizing business analytics. Companies utilize it to analyze server performance or monitor Kubernetes environments and payment transactions. The platform integrates with AWS services and other data sources to ensure observability and system health tracking, focusing on performance metrics through customized dashboards and alerts. Organizations employ Grafana to bolster observability and optimize infrastructure through robust data insights.
New Relic offers real-time application monitoring and insight into performance bottlenecks. Its customizable dashboards and APM integration provide efficient operational support, while server performance alerts ensure quick issue detection.
New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring of application performance, tracking bottlenecks across databases and front-end components. Users employ it for server and infrastructure monitoring, as well as analyzing key metrics such as CPU and memory usage. The solution's ability to integrate with tools like PagerDuty enhances incident management capabilities. However, users have expressed a need for improvements in query language simplicity, more detailed historical insights, and better mobile app monitoring support.
What are New Relic's most important features?In industries like e-commerce and financial services, New Relic supports application performance monitoring to enhance user experience and system reliability. Organizations leverage its insights for optimizing performance, particularly in server operations and infrastructure management. Its ability to monitor API failures through synthetic monitoring is crucial for maintaining high service levels.
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