N-able N-central vs New Relic

N-able N-central is highly suitable for IT Admins within large organizations that need oversight of all it equipment. Ideal for managing organizations that need inventory and management of more than 10 IT devices. Highly inappropriate for smaller scale companies that mange less than 10 PCs

New Relic has been an integral part of suiting all our monitoring requirements. With New Relic, we have been able to monitor all the servers in our environment, which consist of both windows and Linux machines. New relic has been playing a very vital role in getting our AWS instances under monitoring as well for the likes of AWS FSx, S3, Storage gateway, etc. While there is a wide range of usability of New Relic, we do have a lot of on-prem storage devices that don't allow any external software to be installed; hence we are not able to use New relic for monitoring them.

• Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
• Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
• Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.

• Monitor traffic rates and server usage on real time
• Helps engineers to dive deep into an issue and guides them to the root cause
• Provides high-level system health status of different components (ie. Server capacity, RPM, page load time, error rate..)
• Near real time reporting
• Links with deployment so easy to understand if an issue has occurred after a particular release

• Expensive software
• The support team are terrible
• Sales team will promise the world to get you over the line
• Subscription management is tedious
• Old software with very little development and the support team will not provide any further information on this - no roadmap
• Integrations galore - but none of them are effective

• Finer control on what metrics are sent to New Relic Platform to control the costs as it has pricing based on GB of metrics ingested.
• UX/UI could be improved as some pages are a bit slow or difficult to view though it provides good information to act upon.
• Have the option to choose a Cloud provider to keep data within the country and also restrict access based on IP address so that we could control New Relic console access.

Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.

I have not yet found any similar product that offers me this range of features to help us keep our online service fast and reliable. Besides this, New Relic is constantly evolving by adding new plugins to emerging technologies and platforms. Server performance measuring features are a key point as our user database grows.

The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.

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.

we have never had any down time issues!!!

there are times where browser cache will cause issues that require you to clear your browser before continuing.

For the most part, support has been good, but often we need to reach out to our account manager to ask that cases be escalated. First level support can often be frustrating to work with. There are particular support engineers that we know we won't get good service from when they are assigned to cases. The level of support offered did become worse when the company was sold to SolarWinds.

There are times I feel that the initial support is lacking. And in some cases the automated responses of not hearing anything are annoying if the reason why there has been no movement is because we are still waiting to hear back from NR support. So, i think they should loose the automation as it can seem disingenuous

Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one

The documentation was clear and concise; the only issue we ran into was custom application naming. Due to HTTPD mod_fcgid and the need for the application name to be set in php.ini (not in .htaccess or the virtual host directive) ... we had issues setting this up.

N-Central has automation manager, which allows you to automate multiple tasks, thereby saving time and effort through Automated patching. AV and Backups are built into the system, and can be deployed by checking a box. It's easy to update and keep secure. File transfer and remote controls are great and make easy work from off-site.

New Relic has a native integration with the IaaS service that the company utilizes which made it very easy to set up, integrate, and it also has consolidated billing with that IaaS service which is a big plus for the organization. After evaluating, I also thought it had the strongest APM capabilities compared to its competition.

It's easy to scale. However, it isn't as easy to keep track of costs and who own's what/

• Reduced time to manage and support servers and endpoints.
• Provides support dept with more accurate information to assess and resolve issues quicker and more efficiently.
• The subscription cost associated with N-central, to our clients has a good profit margin for us.

• Gives us great visibility into what our services are doing at all times.
• Alerts us quickly when there is a problem so we can address it with alacrity.
• Gives us extremely customizable options in regards to how we want to track, store, and materialize our data.