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."
"I have found the logging and tracing features the most valuable."
"The most valuable features are the dashboards and the reporting."
"The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS."
"The solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great."
"The flexibility to create notebooks and dashboards and fully customize them gives us a lot of power to track the exact services and endpoints we are working on."
"It has a high-level insight into the infrastructure model of the application and provides important detailed data on the host and metrics, which is the main concern of our customers."
"They have a very good foundation in capturing metrics, logs, and traces. It's a very nice tool for that and it allows you to apply these monitoring tools in almost any technology."
"The most valuable features are infrastructure monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM)."
"New Relic has helped us in terms of the optimizing our print and loading times."
"Every time there is a crisis, high traffic, or if we see a problem with a server, we go to New Relic and monitor it to determine the cause."
"The feature I found most valuable is being able to design my queries. It's easy to design a query."
"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 synthetic alert is the most valuable feature in New Relic APM. I also like the time travel feature and find traceability useful in the solution. New Relic APM also has good response times."
"The VPN is one of the solution's most valuable features for us."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to track and easy to follow."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."
"Datadog is expensive."
"Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times."
"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."
"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."
"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."
"We'd like Datadog to make the log storage cheaper."
"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."
"One thing I'd like to see in any APM, especially New Relic, is the ability to use distributed transactions. When one microservice calls another, it calls another database and microservice. The entire data visualization layer will not be able to correlate from one microservice from end to end and return on that path. Distributed transactions would be a great addition that would make life simpler. Unfortunately, no APM has that end-to-end capability."
"There are times when you restart the engines and the servers have a unique ID for the host and you need to remove the server. It is difficult because some are on-premise and others are production hosts. Having downtime is not very good when updating. However, it is not a constant issue."
"I would like if it could have predictive analysis. Today, we only have the option to configure thresholds."
"Documentation could be improved in New Relic APM, so users would have more clarity on configuring the dashboard. If New Relic gave better guidelines, users would find it easier to understand the metrics and features of New Relic APM. Another area for improvement is integration with Kubernetes. Currently, the process isn't user-friendly. It's challenging and lacks documentation for users to understand how to integrate New Relic APM with Kubernetes quickly. With multiple levels of Kubernetes dockers and other DBs on different clouds, it's tricky to gather all into New Relic APM on a single dashboard. What I'd like to see in the next version of New Relic APM is a single dashboard where you can easily view which applications fall under specific APMs. If there's a search feature where you can type in a keyword to find out if an APM is related to a particular application, that would be great."
"I would like to have storage monitoring. E.g., being able to monitor SANS, specifically protocols, like NFS and CIFS metrics."
"The solution does not provide input on how the page performs in a big group. It just says that the page performance is bad, but it does not say what can be done to improve it. If they could provide some insight or guidance on how to make improvements, that would be a big help."
"The APIs could be better. I would also like more APIs and features to integrate with streaming solutions, like Kinesis or Kafka."
"It would be nice if there were pre-made dashboards."
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 151 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, AppDynamics and Elastic Observability, whereas New Relic is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Grafana, Azure Monitor and Prometheus. 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