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 most valuable features of Datadog are the flexibility and additional features when compared to other solutions, such as AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Some of the features include AI and ML capabilities and cloud and analysis monitoring"
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"The network map is crucial in identifying bottlenecks and determining what needs more attention."
"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."
"The web app has a real-time support chat window in which a support engineer is chatting with you within a minute."
"Datadog has made it much easier to have a central place for people to look for logs and made it much easier to notify them of any elevated error rates or failures."
"It has empowered all our platform engineers with a very powerful and easy to use monitoring system."
"The most valuable features of New Relic are the reports and ease of use."
"The alert mechanism is quite accurate when something goes wrong in your system. For example, if you have hundreds of APIs on your server, and any of the APIs is not performing well, you get an alert. When there is a drop or change in the threshold value, the beauty of New Relic is that within a fraction of seconds, all the stakeholders who are configured in the New Relic system will get an alert. That's one good thing."
"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."
"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."
"Their technical support is pretty good and responsive. We have a real good relationship with them."
"The tool's most valuable features were APM and core reliability. We get alerts whenever an anomaly is detected. The solution is very friendly."
"Working with the solution is very easy. It's user-friendly."
"The synthetics, alerts, and native inbuilt capabilities for monitoring the cloud with the New Relic agents have been helpful."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."
"We would like to see smaller or shorter tutorials and video sessions."
"We have asked technical support questions, and sometimes they don't get back to us right away. Or when they do, it is not the right answer."
"The product needs a better Datadog agent installation."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"I would like testing for data in the future."
"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."
"The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments."
"I would like if it could have predictive analysis. Today, we only have the option to configure thresholds."
"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."
"I would like to be able to invest less time in IT and ad hocs. We should be concentrating on other issues."
"There has been some problem with the agent, and it is just not working well. It is not able to record information with the application server. They have been able to fix the issue, but it took quite a long time. This is the main issue in the APM products and also in New Relic. The mobile application monitoring has been pretty difficult to set up and also quite expensive. It should be a little bit easier and cheaper. Because it is pretty difficult and expensive, many customers don't take it."
"The price needs improvement."
"New Relic APM could improve error debugging and the correlation with the logs. We are receiving some alerts or alarms but we need to correlate with the error log, but it is difficult if it is more than seven months retention period, it is hard to trace. We need this especially for getting historical information."
"How granular I could go down at looking at certain data, especially related to the operations, is limited."
"In addition, its difficult to have a predictive tool to see how the application would behave in the future when it basically only shows the historical data."
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