HashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in the IT infrastructure. It provides service discovery, health checking, key/value stores and support for multiple data centers out of the box.
$0
always free
New Relic
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
New Relic is a SaaS-based web and mobile application performance management provider for the cloud and the datacenter. They provide code-level diagnostics for dedicated infrastructures, the cloud, or hybrid environments and real time monitoring.
$0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Pricing
HashiCorp Consul
New Relic
Editions & Modules
Open Source (self-managed)
$0
always free
HCP Consul (Cloud)
$0.027/hr
Per Hour
Enterprise
Self-Managed Custom Deployments
Free (Forever)
$0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Telemetry Data Platform
$0.25
per month per extra GB data ingest (after first free 100GB per month)
Incident Intelligence
$0.50
per month per event (after first 1000 free events per month)
Standard
$99
per month per full user (after first free full user - unlimited free basic users)
Consul can provide a light-weight, lightning-fast and robust solution for the following:
Network mesh
Service DNS
Global key-value store (values can be complex objects as well)
Utility for blue-green deployments
Service health checking
Consul can be used in any or a combination of these scenarios. Regardless if you are a network administrator or a regular software engineer, Consul can add value to your work.
New Relic was super easy to implement and very easy to use and navigate. Before NR we had log files all over the place on different windows VMs, was horrible to manage. But now we have them in one central place that we can query, review and monitor.
Capturing Front end Metrics specially web vitals and setting up alerts for violations really helps.
NRQL is great tool to fetch the data you need. With queries you can pull the data and put the data by table or by chart. You can even trend graphs and create dashboards.
Synthetic Monitoring is very helpful for proactive monitoring. You can use it for user journeys by using scripted browser monitor type or just check availability using PING type.
ASk AI is great addition that can fetch details you need with natuaral language
The GUI: The GUI interface for Consul has gotten a lot better over the years. Since Consul is so easy to interact with via API, this isn't a showstopper, but for those that are less command line inclined it's always nice to be able to refer them to an easy to use and understand web interface
It's chatty: Consul is extremely chatty. Sometimes it's particularly chatty at 2am with no indication as to why and eats up quite a bit of resources. Just be sure to provision your systems that typically take a heavy load with a little extra for Consul
The only issue that we have had with New Relic is that the price might be a little expensive for smaller companies. The amount of data you store in New Relic impacts the cost, and can get away from you if you don't work closely with the vendor. Overall though the application is top notch.
Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.
As an engineer, New Relic has been very quick and easy for me to pick up/install/use. It has been less easy for some of the less technical-minded folks in our organization and their UI still is inconsistent multiple years after refactoring their platform to be New Relic One.
I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.
The support team has been really helpful and resolved most of the issues on time. However, for a couple of issues, several follow-ups were needed to elicit a reasonable response. The issue was deeply technical and could have been investigated only by their Architects, and bringing them into the ticket took longer than needed
It's better to start by implementing New Relic in one project and test everything. Try to follow best recommended practices and read all the official documentation. Everything seems well tested. Then, start by installing agents to the rest of your projects and keep a close look to all logs and metrics New Relic gives you.
Consul was easier to configure out of the box than Serf and gave us more initial options. Its easy to use tools and support were by far superior to Serf in many ways. Support alone was one of those areas that Serf could take an example from Consul to keep its customers happy.
New Relic is the most full-featured offering that we've found, and is incredibly easy to start using with a PHP app. The New Relic agent is installed as a PHP extension so it is able to monitor and track the performance of any PHP app being run by the web server. Other tools required the installation and setup of a PHP dependency at the application level.
It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.
