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Datadog vs. New Relic Comparison

Which is the best APM and observability provider for you?

March 24, 2023

Written by
Louis-Victor Jadavji, Cofounder of Taloflow

Who should you choose and why?

✋ Most important consideration

  • Although New Relic’s observability tooling is comprehensive, if you’re looking for a more broad-based monitoring solution from a single vendor relationship, Datadog has 17 other products to combine with its APM and Code Profiling capabilities.

🤔 Strongly consider Datadog over New Relic if

  • You have a scaleup tech company with a dedicated DevOps and/or SRE team.
  • You need continuous code profiling to detect performance issues in the code itself.
  • You need much more flexible or customizable dashboarding for distribution to different types of teams.
  • You need roll-back or automatic configuration changes (including for cloud cost optimization).

🤔 Strongly consider New Relic over Datadog if

  • You’d rather have dynamic instrumentation with language-independent agents over manual instrumentation and want support for 3rd party agents (OTEL/Prometheus).
  • You run a complex hybrid environment, including monoliths, SOA, and microservice-based architectures.

📝Other Notes

  • While Datadog tends to have the lower-priced offering for most use cases, New Relic prices are based on the volume of data (GB) through the platform, which can be advantageous if you aren’t collecting too much data.
  • Datadog offers several other services in its Observability suite to pair with its APM, including a very mature Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring product which is also its first product ever in the market.
  • New Relic’s anomaly detection for application logs is relatively immature.
Datadog

Datadog

Datadog has been at the forefront of cloud monitoring for cloud-native companies. Its Application Performance Monitoring (APM) service is part of an extensive portfolio of complementary monitoring and observability tools. By capturing traces across various layers and services, Datadog APM provides developers with deep insights into their applications' performance, allowing for more effective troubleshooting and performance optimization.
Datadog

New Relic

New Relic, one of the pioneering APM providers, has successfully reinvented its product to meet the requirements of a modern observability platform. The solution now provides insights into the software, infrastructure, and customer experience, offering businesses comprehensive visibility into their digital systems. New Relic's observability platform ensures that companies can efficiently manage system performance, understand customer experience, and accelerate software delivery.
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“Gotchas”

  • New Relic’s dashboard query language looks useful but lacks critical functions like multiple data sets or advanced calculations.
  • Datadog’s drawdown-style deal structures for its larger clients require extensive usage planning and forecasting.
  • Datadog is actually 17 different products which include 11 different pricing models so it can be hard for you to know in advance how much you are going to pay for what.

Feature Comparison

Feature

Use Case Fit

Problem Resolution

Pricing

Observability

Instrumentation

Integration With Other Services

Not all observability providers have the integrations or compatibility with tools and languages like Rancher, AlertOps, or Rust.



Compliance Requirements

Compliance with standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, FedRAMP and more have been tracked and recorded.



About the Author

Louis-Victor Jadavji (or "LV") is a recognized leader in the cloud services industry. He's helped 50+ digital native companies like ModusBox, Later, and NS1 choose the right cloud stack for their applications. His work has been featured in Forbes (30 Under 30 All-Star), HuffPost, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Inc. Magazine.

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