Nagios Log Server vs New Relic

Nagios Log Server facilitates the ability to search all entries of logs in a quick and easy way. Beyond that, it has allowed us to configure alerts for notification when there are potential threats (may they be security threats or only application-side problems), and to filter the data for audits and compliance.

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.

• Log auditing.
• Server monitoring.

• 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

• A bit hard to install and configure.
• High price.

• 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.

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.

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.

Nagios support is decent. Nothing bad to say about them, but nothing extraordinary too. We mostly asked them questions instead of actively asking them to change or fix things for us. The response time is OK, commonly you can get a response in the same day. You can also call, but they are available only during US office hours.

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

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.

Windows Event Log doesn't have 10% of the capabilities of Nagios Log Server. No real-time alerts, no scheduling, no external plugins or APIs. Nothing. The only advantage is that it is a native Windows application.

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/

• We could react in way less time to a lot of potential outages since we started using it.

• 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.