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.
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is Proactive Monitoring and Alerting."
"It helped to find quick solutions for specific business transactions."
"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."
"It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL."
"AppDynamics' best feature is automation - for example, when I add a note, it can understand the data automatically."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is that you can easily determine the load on the application."
"It is a stable solution."
"The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities."
"End-user Synthetics and monitoring are very good."
"We were able to integrate with the messaging tool, Slack, which meant that we got notifications whenever something was not quite right."
"It offers helpful user metrics so we can learn more about the user experience."
"It has in-depth analysis using developer code for someone whose not traditionally a developer."
"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 has given us better insight into the performance of the system."
"Server uptime is its most valuable feature."
"As New Relic is already integrated with Drupal, we can get our projects done with best practice and with the best value that we believe in."
"If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool."
"I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible."
"The infrastructure is not as good as other solutions."
"Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve."
"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."
"The solution could be more user-friendly for diagnostic purposes. Anyone who is using the solution should be able to infer what that error is about, they should be able to troubleshoot it better."
"AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer."
"The end-user experience is not really good because we can't catch all of the transactions. We only can catch the full stack of flow transactions, but I think that this is caused by the technology they use. If they will catch every transaction, it will cause a very big load on the performance of applications. The monitoring of all transactions needs improvement."
"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."
"The browser isn't exactly reliable."
"The price needs improvement."
"New Relic does enable frontend performance monitoring by default. However, when we are troubleshooting the issue, New Relic is not able to trace back to the service where the issue is. Other solutions, such as Dynatrace are better."
"Some of our customers see New Relic as a promising product to have, and we would like to deliver it to them. The only way we would be able to do that would be if we had server appliance for clients that we could install in their data centres."
"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."
"The solution should include more detailed reports for SQL database requests."
"They could improve the education process and how people understand that these tools are very technical. Right now, if someone was to pick it up from day one, it is a very steep learning curve."
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