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 solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"Dashboards and their versatility are among the most valuable features."
"It has turned into an operational dashboard. If you felt something is going wrong, you can immediately open up Datadog. It has been our go to application because we know the answer will be there."
"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."
"It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale."
"We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications."
"We like the distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging. This has been invaluable for us during periods of high traffic or red alert conditions."
"It has enhanced the performance of my team."
"New Relic has helped us in terms of the optimizing our print and loading times."
"The solution is scalable, and it is easy because all the documentation is available."
"We are able to drill down and see what is going on in the system."
"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."
"It allows the restriction of privileges and control of users."
"The VPN is one of the solution's most valuable features for us."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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."
"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."
"We have recently had a number of issues with stability and delays on logging, monitoring, metric evaluation, and alerts."
"The product could be improved by providing remote control to agents, enabling them to execute automation and collections without requiring another automation tool or integration."
"It can have a more modernized pricing mechanism. We're actually working with them to figure out how to become more modular and have a better and more modernized pricing mechanism. The issue with Datadog is that you have to buy the whole suite of different products, and you kind of get stuck in the old utilization of 40% of their suite. Most organizations today break down between application development, networking, and security. Therefore, there should be a way to break down different modules into just app dev, infosec, networking, etc. Customers have various needs across their business lines, and sometimes, they're just not willing to have tools that they're not using 100%. AppDynamics is probably a little bit better in terms of being modular."
"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."
"Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible."
"The pricing should be less of a surprise."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"We would like to receive more AWS-specific details from the New Relic Dashboard, like EC2 health."
"I would like if it could have predictive analysis. Today, we only have the option to configure thresholds."
"The scalability can be improved."
"The price could improve."
"In the next release, I'd like to see a better pricing structure."
"There were some settings we had issues with."
"The customization of the start and end time is kind of cool."
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