Datadog vs. New Relic: Which is the best DevOps tool for your business? This guide will help you choose.
Datadog and New Relic are two DevOps Software-as-a-Service platforms that can help you get better visibility into your cloud infrastructure. Here’s what you should know about each of these DevOps tools.
SEE: Hiring Kit: Cloud Engineer (TechRepublic Premium)
What is Datadog?
Datadog is a platform that provides cloud monitoring at scale by offering a platform to observe servers, applications and other tools. It brings all necessary information into one dashboard, helping decision-makers receive and act on information faster.
What is New Relic?
New Relic is a competing platform, offering another option for observing the performance of a company’s cloud-based infrastructure. New Relic’s telemetry data platform pulls in 3 billion data points every minute and offers a unified place to access all information.
Datadog vs. New Relic: Feature comparison
| Feature | Datadog | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Event-based notifications | Yes | Yes |
| Synthetic transaction monitoring | No | Yes |
| On-demand virtual training | Yes | Yes |
| Monitoring via mobile app | Yes | Yes |
| Collaboration capabilities | Yes | Yes |
Head-to-head comparison: Datadog vs. New Relic
Automation
Datadog offers numerous ways to automate the creation and running of tests to reduce manual labor. The platform’s end-to-end testing automation options also allow regression testing of new features to ensure updates won’t cause unforeseen problems. The Datadog web recorder also automatically detects user interface changes and updates the tests accordingly, keeping them reliable. The built-in automated incident management tool offers out-of-the-box workflows to save time, while the interactive, collaborative timelines help to determine how an event unfolded.
The New Relic automation capabilities also extend to workflows. They facilitate the automation of common tasks, such as app tagging. The platform also provides a synthetic monitoring suite of automated and scriptable tools that can observe websites, API endpoints and more. Automation within the New Relic architecture can track machine learning models, too. There is an automated tagging feature similar to what Datadog offers. However, New Relic’s version allows tagging the entire stack.
Analytics
Datadog’s DevOps analytics options extend to logs, applications and security metrics. Users can drill down and see associated details for a time frame as recent as the past hour or as far as one week. Users can also customize the maximum size of their metrics without making code changes. There’s an advanced mode that allows aggregating and analyzing them another way, too.
New Relic has the Telemetry Data Platform, which gathers gigabytes of operational information. The Full Stack Observability feature also allows seeing an application’s current state or troubleshooting it in one place. The platform tracks four core data types overall: metrics, events, logs and traces.
Dashboards
Datadog users can choose between out-of-the-box and custom dashboards depending on the type of information they want to see. They can also add a new way to view an existing dashboard without using coding or query language. In addition, features like drag-and-drop widgets and dashboard templates make it easy for users to see all the information they need without getting distracted by irrelevant data. There’s also an API to auto-generate customized dashboards, saving users significant time.
New Relic also offers customized dashboards as well as the option to import data from elsewhere when creating them. Users have numerous ways to customize how their dashboards look, including changing the overall layout or tweaking a chart’s size. Another possibility is to use facet filtering to narrow down a search and find similar dashboards. This approach helps users save time by getting what they need faster.
Choosing between Datadog and New Relic
When choosing between the two products, previous users have mentioned Datadog is better for those who mainly need infrastructure monitoring, while New Relic is better for application monitoring. However, if you’re still unsure which is more appropriate, both Datadog and New Relic will allow you to begin working with the free tier and change your plan after seeing what they can do for you.