Datadog VS New Relic

Both New Relic and Datadog are popular analytics and monitoring tools for applications and infrastructure. New Relic focuses on real-time monitoring and performance optimization, while Datadog provides a comprehensive view of infrastructure and application performance. New Relic is known for its ease of use and powerful search capabilities, while Datadog offers a more flexible and customizable platform.

Here, we will be comparing New Relic and Datadog on the basis of their features, monitoring capabilities, ease of use, security, use cases, and more.

New Relic vs. Datadog: An Overview

New Relic is a leading digital performance management platform that offers real-time insights into the performance of various digital systems, including applications, servers, and infrastructure. It provides a comprehensive set of features, such as monitoring, logging, and analytics to help organizations optimize their digital systems and enhance the overall user experience. By giving businesses visibility into their digital environments, New Relic enables them to identify and troubleshoot issues quickly, improve performance, and make data-driven decisions to drive continuous improvement.

Datadog is a widely recognized monitoring and analytics platform that organizations utilize to track and analyze their application performance, infrastructure, and user experience. It offers comprehensive visibility into system performance, enabling teams to swiftly identify and resolve issues. With Datadog, users can efficiently collect and visualize data from various sources, configure alerts and notifications, and collaborate with team members, etc. to enhance the effectiveness of the overall system.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Key Differences

Datadog and New Relic are both popular platforms used for application and infrastructure monitoring, but there are several key differences between them. Here are some major differences between Datadog and New Relic:

• Datadog and some of other Datadog alternatives are strong on infrastructure monitoring, while New Relic is known for application monitoring.
• Datadog requires command-line scripting for some installations, while New Relic's installation is more straightforward.

New Relic vs. Datadog: In Terms of Features

• Automation: Datadog offers various ways to automate tests and reduce manual labor. It also provides an automated incident management tool and collaborative timelines. On the other hand, New Relic facilitates the automation of common tasks and offers a synthetic monitoring suite. It also has an automated tagging feature and can track machine-learning models.
• Analytics: Datadog's DevOps analytics options include logs, applications, and security metrics. Users can drill down and customize their metrics. While New Relic's Telemetry Data platform gathers gigabytes of operational information and tracks different types of data.
• Network Monitoring: Datadog provides metrics for point-to-point communication and network flows. Apart from that, it automatically collects tags from over 450 integrations. On the other hand, New Relic offers pre-configured dashboards and integrations with popular cloud services and advanced Kubernetes monitoring capabilities.
• APM: Datadog provides distributed tracing to track requests from user sessions to services and databases. It also correlates distributed traces to infrastructure and network metrics. On the other hand, New Relic auto-instrumentation for eight programming languages provides distributed tracing and sampling options for a wide range of technology stacks.
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Datadog allows monitoring of all machines with tags, aliases, and metrics. It also provides visualizations like host maps and container maps. Whereas New Relic enables tracking host performance changes with configuration changes. Apart from that, it allows troubleshooting performance issues by connecting the server side to the application side.
• Log Management: Datadog provides logging without limits and log processing pipelines. It also offers filters for time range, tags, and full-text search. New Relic, on the other hand, accepts any text-based data. It provides custom charts, quick search response times, and machine learning capabilities.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Architecture and Technology

Datadog and New Relic have different approaches to monitoring. Datadog uses a SaaS-based architecture and supports multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. It offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including infrastructure, application, APM (Application Performance Monitoring), logs, and synthetics. On the other hand, New Relic has a more traditional agent-based architecture and primarily focuses on APM and infrastructure monitoring.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Monitoring Capabilities

Datadog and New Relic provide different monitoring capabilities. Datadog offers a comprehensive set of features, including real-time infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, log management, dashboarding, and alerting. It supports various technologies such as containers, microservices, serverless, and cloud platforms. New Relic and other New Relic alternatives primarily focus on APM, providing detailed application performance monitoring and transaction tracing capabilities.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Implementation and Ease of Use

Both platforms have straightforward installation processes, but Datadog requires some command-line scripting. Datadog offers more customization options, but its interface may be overwhelming for new users. New Relic, on the other hand, provides a simpler interface and is highly regarded for data presentation and resolving performance problems.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Third-Party Support

Datadog supports integration into existing IT infrastructure through community APIs and extensions. While New Relic offers extensive community resources for learning, training, and troubleshooting issues via self-serve.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Use Cases

Datadog is ideal for infrastructure monitoring and performance measurement in a multi-cloud world. On the other hand, New Relic is preferred for application monitoring, especially real-time monitoring.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Community Support

Both Datadog and New Relic have active communities and support channels. Datadog has an extensive knowledge base, documentation, and a strong user community. It provides various support levels, including email and chat support, and maintains a repository of APIs, libraries, and community contributions. New Relic, on the other hand, offers documentation, a user community, and support channels like email and chat.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Synthetic Monitoring

New Relic and Datadog both offer synthetic monitoring for APIs and web applications. Datadog's solution allows you to simulate all user interactions and offers analytics in real time to identify performance issues and errors. It also integrates with other alerting systems and monitoring tools. New Relic enables users to create customized tests and provides performance data and in-depth metrics. It integrates with New Relic products like Browser and APM. Datadog's solution is easier to configure and offers in-depth analytics in real time, whereas New Relic offers more customization and integration options.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Extensibility and Integrations

Both platforms offer integration with a wide range of third-party tools and services. Datadog has a large number of integrations, allowing you to collect metrics and data from various sources and technologies. It also provides an open-source agent and API, enabling custom integrations. Whereas New Relic offers integrations but has a very limited selection compared to Datadog.

New Relic vs. Datadog: User Interface and Visualization

Datadog and New Relic have distinct user interfaces and visualization capabilities. Datadog provides a highly customizable and user-friendly interface with interactive dashboards, drag-and-drop widgets, and the ability to create visually appealing visualizations. In contrast, New Relic also offers a user-friendly interface but may have a more standardized and less customizable dashboarding experience.

New Relic vs. Datadog: Pricing

New Relic is more expensive but offers real-time monitoring as a premium feature. On the contrary, Datadog is cheaper and has transparent pricing, but larger deals may require upfront spending.

Both New Relic as well as Datadog offer free plans. Apart from that, New Relic offers three different plans namely, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. For the pricing of the same, one would need to contact the sales team. On the other hand, Datadog offers two different plans, namely, Pro and Enterprise with $15 per host/per month, and $23 per host/per month, respectively.

Which Is Better, New Relic or Datadog?

Determining if New Relic or Datadog is better depends on the specific needs and priorities of the organization. New Relic is known for its focus on application monitoring and real-time insights, which is particularly beneficial for optimizing performance. It offers a user-friendly interface, powerful search capabilities, and features such as automated tagging and synthetic monitoring. Datadog, on the other hand, excels in infrastructure monitoring and provides a flexible and customizable platform. It offers automation options, network monitoring, and APM with distributed tracing.