We performed a comparison between Datadog and New Relic based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Datadog offers valuable features like dashboards, reporting, error reporting, log centralization, ease of use and setup, logs and analysis, user-friendliness for development teams, and interface and integrations. New Relic is known for its in-depth application information, monitoring capabilities, performance, scalability, and user-friendly interface. Datadog can improve in areas such as usability, integration, user interfaces, learning curve, monitoring external websites and SSL security, complex setup, security features, managing organizational structure, customization flexibility, deploying agents, and network monitoring. New Relic can improve in areas such as simplifying server removal, adding network monitoring features, providing detailed troubleshooting information, supporting on-premises licensing, extending the data retention period, and creating a dashboard for front-end and back-end performance monitoring.
Service and Support: Datadog's customer service is highly regarded for its availability and promptness, although there have been some instances of slow or unresponsive support in the Asia-Pacific region. New Relic's customer service has received mixed feedback, with some users praising its efficiency while others have experienced slow response times.
Ease of Deployment: Users have generally found the initial setup for Datadog to be easy and straightforward, although a few found it slightly complex and needed some adjustments. Integration with other applications and platforms was smooth. The initial setup for New Relic is described as simple and not overly difficult. Some users opted for professional services to aid them with the setup process.
Pricing: Some users perceive Datadog's pricing as costly, while others find it reasonable but perplexing. New Relic's pricing is generally regarded as expensive, although a few users deem it acceptable when compared to competitors.
ROI: Users have provided diverse feedback on Datadog's ROI. They have praised its ability to save time, uncover blind spots, and capture incidents. Opinions on New Relic's ROI are more divided, with some users expressing positive experiences while others remain uncertain.
Comparison Results: Datadog is the preferred choice over New Relic. Users find Datadog's initial setup to be easy, straightforward, and efficient. Datadog offers a wider range of features, including error reporting and log centralization, and is considered more user-friendly for development teams. It also provides flexibility with AI and ML capabilities. Users appreciate the helpful and responsive customer service.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The dashboards and the performance of the software have been great."
"Datadog has helped us a ton by allowing us to set up a multitude of easily configurable alarms across our tech stack and infrastructure."
"Flame graphs are pretty useful for understanding how GraphQL resolves our federated queries when it comes to identifying slow points in our requests. In our microservice environment with 170 services."
"Datadog has made it much easier to have a central place for people to look for logs and made it much easier to notify them of any elevated error rates or failures."
"The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling."
"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."
"The observability on offer is the most useful aspect of the product."
"The most useful feature is the APM."
"We detect issues using dashboards that we built on New Relic."
"It has in-depth analysis using developer code for someone whose not traditionally a developer."
"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 solution is good for sending alerts, drawing graphs about system usage, and creating plug-ins."
"As soon as it monitors all our systems and is integrated with PagerDuty, the operations team just needs to wait for alerts on their cellphones to fix things."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to track and easy to follow."
"We were able to integrate with the messaging tool, Slack, which meant that we got notifications whenever something was not quite right."
"We have done the New Relic integration with Serverless AWS, which has helped us with monitoring, and keeping our monitoring from our on-premise part with the cloud part."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The logging could be improved in the future."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."
"At the beginning, when we started throwing logs at it, there was a bit of hiccup. However, this was during their beta period, so hiccups were expected."
"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."
"Its pricing model can be improved. Its settings should be improved for a better understanding of billing. They should also provide some alerts when there is an increase in the usage. For example, if there is 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert."
"It can have an artificial intelligence component. Even though I can seamlessly look at end-to-end security, it would be better to have alerts and notifications powered by an AI engine. I am not sure if they have an AI component. We have not reached out to them or looked at it, but this is something that I keep on talking about within our company in terms of features. Such a feature would be good to have, and it would further optimize my Security Ops team's abilities."
"Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus."
"They need to improve the alerting and dashboarding as these are the key features in DevOps."
"The price needs improvement."
"They should bring the pricing down to be more competitive."
"It gives you amazing statistics, but doesn’t give you enough information about what to do with the statistics."
"The monitoring is only as good as the alerts that it produces. By having it set up fine grain alerting, it is a bit of a pain."
"The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment needs improvement on the filtering part. I would like it to go more granular on accounts."
"The solution needs to have staging."
"I would like to see the company implement the AI auto-baseline feature which Dynatrace has."
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews while New Relic is ranked 3rd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 152 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while New Relic is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". 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". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, AWS X-Ray, Elastic Observability and AppDynamics, whereas New Relic is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Grafana, Prometheus and Azure Monitor. See our Datadog vs. New Relic report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors, best Network Monitoring Software vendors, and best IT Infrastructure Monitoring 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