Struggling to keep your systems afloat? The world of DevOps brings a constant influx of data, and the right monitoring tools are key to keeping your infrastructure stable, responsive, and efficient. You’re likely weighing options, and the “Datadog vs New Relic” debate is probably top of mind. Both platforms are strong contenders, but they come with their own strengths and weaknesses. This article will break down the features, pricing, and overall value to help you decide which one best suits your needs.
Understanding the Basics: Datadog and New Relic
Before diving into the comparison, let’s establish a quick overview of each platform. Datadog is a monitoring and security platform, known for its wide range of integrations and visualizations. New Relic, on the other hand, is a full-stack observability platform, focused on providing deep insights into application performance. Both aim to provide end-to-end monitoring. However, their approach and specific focus areas can differ in crucial ways.
Datadog: The All-in-One Platform
Datadog presents itself as a unified platform for monitoring, security, and analytics. It boasts an extensive list of integrations with cloud providers, databases, and other tools, aiming to provide a single pane of glass for your entire infrastructure. This approach can be appealing to teams looking for a one-stop solution. They want to avoid the complexity of managing multiple disparate tools.
New Relic: Deep Observability Focus
New Relic is designed to provide deep observability into application performance. It’s especially strong when it comes to tracing transactions and diagnosing performance bottlenecks within your application code. This focus is often preferred by teams that prioritize detailed application performance monitoring, and need to pinpoint the root causes of issues quickly and accurately.
Key Features: How Do They Stack Up?
When comparing monitoring platforms, features are often a deciding factor. Here’s a breakdown of key features that DevOps and SRE teams often look for:
Infrastructure Monitoring
- Datadog: Datadog’s infrastructure monitoring is thorough, offering support for a broad range of systems and technologies. This includes server metrics, containers, and cloud services. Its dashboards are flexible, allowing you to visualize data in numerous ways. You can set alerts and track key performance indicators (KPIs) effectively.
- New Relic: New Relic also provides good infrastructure monitoring. It might not have quite as many integrations as Datadog. But it still covers the common needs of most teams. However, the main strength lies in its ability to combine infrastructure data with application traces. This gives a more complete picture.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
- Datadog: Datadog’s APM is very capable. It provides tracing and profiling of applications. However, the UI and workflow may not be as intuitive for those who are more deeply involved in APM troubleshooting.
- New Relic: New Relic truly shines in APM. It offers very detailed transaction tracing and code-level visibility, making it easy to diagnose the root cause of application slowdowns. Its UI is also often praised for ease of use and its features in APM.
Log Management
- Datadog: Datadog includes log management, enabling you to collect, search, and analyze logs from your applications and infrastructure. The feature integrates well with other parts of the Datadog platform, simplifying cross-referencing logs with other metrics.
- New Relic: New Relic provides log management as well. It’s similar to Datadog’s in functionality, but it’s typically not seen as the platform’s primary strength. Many teams often find New Relic APM more beneficial.
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
- Datadog: Datadog’s RUM capabilities allow you to track the performance of your web applications from the perspective of your end-users. This helps teams identify front-end bottlenecks and provide better user experiences.
- New Relic: New Relic offers similar RUM functionality, providing insights into page load times and user interactions. It’s also seamlessly integrated with other APM data. So, this helps to connect front-end performance with backend issues.
Synthetic Monitoring
- Datadog: Datadog’s synthetic monitoring lets you simulate user interactions to ensure your applications are performing correctly. This is particularly useful for testing new features before releasing to production.
- New Relic: New Relic’s synthetic monitoring is also very useful. It helps you detect uptime and performance issues. It is just as capable as Datadog in many cases.
Integrations
- Datadog: Datadog boasts an impressive library of integrations, with support for over 500 different technologies. This comprehensive list makes it very simple to connect to a wide range of services.
- New Relic: While it does offer a good number of integrations, New Relic’s ecosystem is smaller compared to Datadog’s. It still covers the common bases for most teams, but it might need custom work for more specific tools.
Dashboards and Visualizations
- Datadog: Datadog’s dashboards are known for their flexibility. They are customizable and can be used to track almost any metric from your infrastructure and applications. This adaptability makes it ideal for building reports tailored to different teams.
- New Relic: New Relic’s dashboards are also informative. They are especially strong in visualizing data related to application performance. However, they might not be as flexible as Datadog’s for tracking different metrics across a wide range of technologies.
Alerting and Notifications
- Datadog: Datadog provides a powerful system for setting up alerts based on thresholds, anomalies, and other custom conditions. You can also customize notifications to keep your team well informed.
- New Relic: New Relic’s alerting system is also very capable. It allows you to set up policies based on various conditions. But users have reported it’s not always as intuitive as Datadog’s.
AI and Machine Learning
- Datadog: Datadog has been increasing its focus on AI and machine learning. They aim to automate anomaly detection and provide intelligent insights. This helps teams to proactively identify and solve potential issues.
- New Relic: New Relic also incorporates AI, especially in its Applied Intelligence features. This toolset helps automate the detection of incidents and speed up root cause analysis. It learns patterns over time.
Ease of Use: A Crucial Factor
A platform can have great features. But if it’s too difficult to use, it won’t be effective. Here’s a look at each platform from a usability point of view:
Datadog: Flexible but Complex
Datadog’s flexibility can be a double-edged sword. While its wide range of features and integrations are excellent, the platform can also feel overwhelming to new users. Many of the advanced features require a steeper learning curve. But the ability to customize is what makes Datadog appealing to larger teams.
New Relic: More Focused and User-Friendly
New Relic is often praised for its ease of use, especially for APM and application-centric workflows. Its UI is generally more intuitive and easier to navigate. This makes it a good option for teams that want to get up and running quickly. They don’t want to spend too much time on initial setup.
Pricing: How Much Will It Cost?
Pricing is a very important part of any decision. Both Datadog and New Relic use a consumption-based pricing model. This can get tricky for teams trying to estimate their monthly costs. Here’s a breakdown to make it easier:
Datadog’s Approach
Datadog’s pricing is modular. Meaning you pick what services you need, and pay accordingly. It offers different plans based on the types of monitoring you use. This can include infrastructure, APM, security, logs, and more. Each of these can be paid in terms of the number of hosts or the amount of data ingested. This approach gives flexibility but it can get hard to predict the final cost.
New Relic’s Approach
New Relic uses a more simplified pricing model based on user seats and data consumption. The cost depends on how many users are accessing the platform and how much data you’re bringing into the system. While simpler, it can also become costly as you grow. Especially if you have large amounts of data from numerous apps and services.
Key Considerations
- Data Volume: Both platforms charge based on the amount of data ingested. So, this is one of the biggest factors affecting your monthly bill. If your infrastructure generates large amounts of logs and metrics, plan ahead to optimize your data ingestion and retention policies.
- Number of Users: New Relic’s model is user-based. Meaning, the more users you have accessing the platform, the higher the cost will be.
- Required Features: It’s important to only pay for the features that you really need, as both platforms offer many extras that may not be useful for you. Start small and expand if you need to.
- Free Tier: Both platforms offer free tiers that allow you to test their features. This is a good way to see if one is a better match for your team before making a big financial commitment.
Use Cases: Finding the Right Fit
To make the decision easier, it helps to consider specific use cases. Here’s when you might choose one over the other:
When Datadog Might Be a Better Choice
- Diverse Infrastructure: If your organization uses a wide array of cloud providers, databases, and other services, Datadog’s vast integration library could make setup easier.
- Custom Dashboards: If you need maximum flexibility in creating custom dashboards and reports, Datadog has the best solution.
- Security: Datadog has strong security monitoring tools, making it a good option for teams that want to integrate security with other observability practices.
- Rapid Scaling: If your infrastructure is constantly changing, Datadog’s adaptable pricing and feature set make it good for rapid scaling.
When New Relic Might Be a Better Choice
- Heavy APM Needs: If your organization’s top concern is application performance and deep transaction tracing, New Relic’s APM features and user interface make it the better option.
- Ease of Use: If your team has limited experience with monitoring platforms, New Relic’s more user-friendly UI makes it easier to set up and use the platform quickly.
- Specific Workflow: If your workflow is heavily focused on application issues and root cause analysis, New Relic provides tools and features that support that very well.
- Application-Centric Data: If you like to have data presented with a focus on the application and not infrastructure, New Relic is best. It integrates different types of data into an application-centric view.
Real-World Scenarios: Examples in Action
To better illustrate the differences, let’s examine a few practical scenarios:
Scenario 1: A Small Startup
A startup with a microservices architecture running on AWS needs a platform that’s easy to set up. They need something that can monitor their infrastructure and applications without taking a lot of time to implement.
- Choice: New Relic, with its ease of use and focus on APM, might be a good fit. Its intuitive interface would help their small team get up and running fast.
Scenario 2: A Large Enterprise
A large enterprise with a complex hybrid infrastructure, which includes on-premise servers and multiple cloud providers, needs a platform that has wide integrations and the ability to unify the view of all their systems.
- Choice: Datadog’s massive integration library and flexible dashboards make it the better option. They could then bring all of their data into a single view.
Scenario 3: A Fintech Company
A fintech company that runs a highly regulated transactional application requires a platform that can provide deep insights into the performance of their applications and also has security baked in.
- Choice: Datadog, because its strong security capabilities and overall monitoring features would be an ideal fit. It could also provide an audit trail for their transactional environment.
Implementation Considerations: Getting Started
No matter which platform you choose, some key considerations will help you with implementation:
Planning and Strategy
- Define Goals: Before deploying any monitoring solution, you must know what you hope to achieve. Are you optimizing for uptime? Minimizing downtime? Improving application performance? Defining your goals will help you pick the right tool and configure it properly.
- Map Infrastructure: Understand the structure of your current infrastructure. This helps with determining what components need monitoring and what kind of data you should collect.
- Data Governance: Plan how you will manage the data you gather. Set policies for data retention and aggregation to keep your costs down and ensure that you’re capturing data that provides useful insights.
Deployment Steps
- Agent Installation: Both Datadog and New Relic depend on agents installed on the systems to collect data. Carefully follow the instructions to install the agents on all of your resources.
- Configure Integrations: Set up all needed integrations to make sure that you’re pulling all of the metrics from your systems.
- Customize Dashboards: Set up custom dashboards to view key metrics. Tailor these views to different team roles for the best results.
- Alerting Policies: Define clear alerting policies based on different conditions and metrics. Make sure that you are only alerted for high priority issues.
Ongoing Management
- Monitor Performance: Check the platform’s performance regularly. Make sure that it is working well and not causing any overhead on your systems.
- Fine-Tune Settings: You may need to fine-tune settings over time to improve performance. Change configurations based on what you learn from real-world usage.
- Regular Reviews: Periodically review your data governance policies and ensure that they align with your goals, and that your infrastructure is working well.
The Verdict: Which Platform Comes Out on Top?
So, which platform is the winner? There isn’t a clear, universal answer. The right option depends heavily on your specific requirements.
- Datadog is best for large, diverse infrastructures that need a wide integration list and want custom dashboards and security tools.
- New Relic is better for teams primarily focused on APM, that need deep transaction tracing and code-level insights and a user-friendly interface.
In truth, both are very capable, robust, and effective monitoring tools. The best choice often comes down to which aligns more with your primary needs. Both have a free trial tier for you to explore the platform and decide what’s best for your organization.
Making the Right Choice for Your Team
Choosing between Datadog and New Relic is a serious task. It depends on many things, but it all comes down to this: what does your team value most in a monitoring platform? Do you need extreme flexibility, or do you need deep application insight? Do you need easy to set up security tools, or a simplified user interface? Once you understand your needs and priorities, you will be in a better position to select the ideal tool. As you continue to explore this space, you will find that the monitoring landscape is vast and ever-changing. Being aware of tools and their features is just the start. Finding the perfect tool is a journey, and choosing the right platform for your team is the biggest step.