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.
"The most valuable feature is the flow map."
"The initial setup is simple."
"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."
"Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic."
"The features that I like best are the dashboard and Business Journey."
"I like how the AppDynamics dashboard portrays the information flows. When a task is executed, various flows between different applications and databases happen in the background. The dashboard is intuitive and helps visualize the connections, the directions of the flow, and the information related to these specific sessions."
"The best feature of AppDynamics is the analytics, which gives us the business insights of the application."
"We are able to correlate performance between tiers."
"Sometimes, I monitor the user's time of response and use this information to improve the number of servers on the back-end. Or, I can use it to change my back log for front-end developers and improve their response times. It's very important in this case because I can improve the experience of the final user."
"They have baseline level alerting."
"The VPN is one of the solution's most valuable features for us."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to receive in-depth information about applications. It can detect a lot of important information."
"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 solution is scalable, and it is easy because all the documentation is available."
"What I like best about New Relic APM is its user interface because it's simple. The most valuable feature of New Relic APM is end-to-end monitoring."
"We are able to drill down and see what is going on in the system."
"I’d like to see better out-of-the-box visual reporting so that we can roll this up to management."
"It would help to maybe have a more graphical interface and more user-friendly graphics."
"AppDynamics is dealing with a lot of products and technologies, so we need to have clear documentation."
"I would like to see more of a unified platform. They're very, very new on the server side, machine agents. I want them to be more mature in this area."
"The Log Analytics feature is a bit complicated."
"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 cloud licensing needs to be improved. It's quite pricey."
"The documentation and training material have room for improvement."
"We have had issues with our agents going offline."
"The product has good documentation for Linux, however, their documentation for Windows is lacking substantially. It's something they need to develop."
"We would like to receive more AWS-specific details from the New Relic Dashboard, like EC2 health."
"They could improve the education process and how people understand that these tools are very technical. Right now, if someone was to pick it up from day one, it is a very steep learning curve."
"Data Dog captures the entire session and then provides it as a video player path, which gives more insight into what the user was doing. It's pretty impressive. New Relic does that, yet it only captures using a couple of screenshots, which is not very detailed since you are unable to see the entire user flow."
"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."
"I would like an infrastructure network that provides real-time views, showing the issues."
"I would like to be able to invest less time in IT and ad hocs. We should be concentrating on other issues."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 154 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.
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