Compare Datadog vs. New Relic for IT monitoring in 2024
Compare Datadog vs. New Relic capabilities including alerts, log management, incident management and more. Learn which tool is best for your organization.
Monitoring tools can help IT admins unveil the information they need to troubleshoot and analyze software performance.
Monitoring helps identify bugs and issues that limit workflows from operating smoothly. Datadog and New Relic are two monitoring tools that provide a range of capabilities and offerings including application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring and many different integrations.
Compare Datadog vs. New Relic in their capabilities that range from log management to incident management to alerts and more. Choosing the right tool can lead to benefits such as improved efficiency, cost savings and customer success.
Datadog
Datadog triggers workflows and enables you to set up intricate dashboards and alerts for real-time insights into system health, KPIs and applications. At the time of publication, Datadog offers more than 750 integrations with different platforms, tools and services such as Google Cloud, automation and languages. In this example, each AWS service is a separate integration, but other platforms such as GitHub would only be one integration.
Install an agent on each host to meet instance monitoring requirements. Datadog provides a script to get started. It takes a few minutes to configure and start reporting back instance metrics.
Application metrics are more of a challenge. Datadog's tracing libraries must be imported into the application code instead of any logging libraries currently in use. Datadog has several other offers such as CI Pipeline Visibility and a scanner for secrets and other sensitive data. Each offer comes with its own price tag and tier. Depending on which additional features and tiers you want to use, it can be a challenge to navigate cost.
For example, the business plan tier of the Log Management offering costs $15 a month per host. Hosts generate logs that Datadog can ingest for $0.10 per GB and retain for 30 days for an additional $2.50 per million log events. You can add the APM offering for the applications running on those hosts for an additional $31 to $45 a month per host, and an additional service called Cloud Cost Monitoring to monitor the cost of running those instances in AWS can be added at an additional $7.50 per month for each host.
The user experience of configuring Datadog's alerts and dashboards is streamlined. This is good for large enterprises where these agents will be on hundreds of thousands of instances.
New Relic
New Relic was originally a tool for APM and evolved to include other offerings such as infrastructure monitoring. The platform can integrate with a variety of services and platforms. At the time of publication, there are over 700 offerings.
New Relic has different pricing structure from Datadog, which doesn't charge by the host or type of monitoring, but by a combination of the amount of data ingested and the number of users with access to the platform. New Relic offers a free tier where the first 100 GB of data ingested by the platform is free, as well as one user account.
One area where New Relic could use some improvement is agent and workflows. Certain steps within the installation and setup process aren't clear or need additional configuration before the agent reports back. Once fully set up, the infrastructure monitoring provides many of the same insights that Datadog's does.
The setup and implementation of the New Relic APM is smooth. This implementation allows application performance to be monitored between different deployments. You can then track how each release will affect the deployed application's performance. Install a language-specific agent on whatever host is running the application to set this up. Depending on the language, you may have to import the agent into your application's runtime.
Choosing the right option
Choosing the right monitoring service to use depends on your specific goals and requirements. Some of these services fare better than others. Different platforms do well in different categories.
Application performance monitoring
The New Relic platform was built around APM. It is able to set up and integrate with an existing application, no matter if it is running on an EC2 instance, an Elastic Container Service task or a Lambda function.
Datadog not only charges extra for APM but requires its own libraries to fully utilize it.
Infrastructure monitoring
Datadog's agent setup is straightforward, something that will scale well no matter how many instances require setup.
New Relic has had issues that might cause some headache when setting up new instances.
Integrations
Both platforms have a variety of integrations with different platforms and services that can be monitored or used in alerting and downstream workflows.
Pricing
New Relic has a 100 GB free tier. Depending on how many hosts and users you need to set up, the price for each user can fluctuate between $49 and $99 per month on the standard plan, depending on what type of permissions they need.
Christopher Blackden got his first IT job at the age of 15 and has since held positions in several different disciplines, including system administration and software engineering. Currently, he's a DevOps engineer at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
