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.
"We previously had an operations team continuously monitoring applications. Now, they just have set things up and our developers can monitor, view, and act on them, accordingly."
"AppDynamics' most valuable feature is Business iQ, which is based on analytics."
"AppDynamics is scalable."
"AppDynamics provides us with detailed information about the performance of the underlying infrastructure, including servers, databases, and external services."
"What I like best about AppDynamics is that it's functional, particularly in APM in Java and .NET."
"Applications: This provides us insight into how our applications are performing within our environments and affords us the ability to identify opportunities and make changes to code / environment to effect positive performance lift."
"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."
"The flow map is very valuable to us. Before we installed APM, we had no idea how our application looked."
"To me, the most valuable feature of New Relic APM is the traceability, mainly based on the time travel method, so you get the overall response time, which is pretty helpful for developers and ADR techs looking into issues on a deeper level. New Relic APM is a very good, tailor-made solution."
"The solution is good for sending alerts, drawing graphs about system usage, and creating plug-ins."
"The most valuable features are infrastructure monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM)."
"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."
"It has a simple initial setup."
"We like the performance of the product."
"It has helped my organization to dive deeper into the application using the APM module is very helpful."
"It does everything we wanted it to do."
"AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high."
"It is stable, but the only downside is the licensing part."
"The UI could use a little help."
"Its resiliency can be improved. We're told that the best we can do with an on-prem solution is to have a hot standby that requires a manual switchover. So, it is a do-it-yourself Ikea model of maintaining data consistency between two servers, without having low balance or failover considerations for an on-prem solution."
"There are too many installers available for this solution."
"The integration with cloud services is still pending with AppDynamics. We would like the product to be serverless."
"Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve."
"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 solution is quite expensive."
"I would like to be able to invest less time in IT and ad hocs. We should be concentrating on other issues."
"It gives you amazing statistics, but doesn’t give you enough information about what to do with the statistics."
"It is a serious tool and requires a lot of time invested in order to understand how it works."
"There were some settings we had issues with."
"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."
"The older view is much better than the new view that they have. We'd like to go back to that previous version. The user interface just isn't as nice as it used to be."
"Documentation is one of the biggest things that I have a problem with since its documentation is not clear sometimes."
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.
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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