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
pfSense
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
$179
per appliance
Pricing
New Relic
pfSense
Editions & Modules
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)
I have used New Relic in different scenarios like monitoring my production infrastructure and applications which helps us to reduce the downtime of my applications and websites and also I have used the synthetic monitoring feature which helps to proactively monitor our websites availability. Along with this I have also used New Relic for cloud resources cost monitoring which helps to reduce my cloud cost. Also I have used mobile application monitoring which helps me to trace the sessions easily and I can easily reduce my RCA through the help of that.
I believe PFSense is well suited for both home lab environments as well as up to small to mid-size business environments on a tight budget. However, I would implore that anything in production requires the use of the authorized hardware that PFSense sells to receive support. However, in my experience, PFSense is a solid set-and-forget firewall solution.
New Relic APM allows us to follow up transactions across services and trace performance bottlenecks in real-time, crucial when monitoring the processing of energy loads or predictive maintenance algorithms.
It gives us deep visibility into our cloud servers, containers and IOT gateways, so we can catch CPU spikes or memory leaks which can impact the data we ingest from the field devices.
We develop custom dashboards for monitoring trends of power consumption, abnormality in sensors and API health. In conjunction with alerting, it makes sure we are fixing issues before customers even see them.
Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.
I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.
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.
New Relic offer a clean and good interface with powerful visualization tool making easier to monitor the infra and application performance in real time. It has the user friendly UI as compare to other tools. It also helps us to monitor the business related data. It also supports the wide range of integrations with its agents and also with other methods. It price is also good enough as compare to its competitors. It also launches new features time to time which helps us to decrease the MTTD and also it supports the integration through OTEL.
The pfSense UI is easy to navigate and pretty go look at. It is much better than some high dollar firewalls that just throw menus you you. The pfSense UI is quick and responsive and makes sense 99% of the time. Changes are committed quickly and the hardware rarely requires a reboot. It just runs.
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.
New Relic has full stack visibility and gives us all options for observability like one stop shop. It gives you front end, backend as well synthetic monitoring capabilities. Every other feature built into one cost model (usually) which ties to data that you send, it helps you leverage all features without having to pay additional charge for feature
Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN interoperability, non-subscription based pricing, auditability, not relying on the infrastructure of a third party, more transparency of what's actually going on, easier to deploy replacements if hardware fails. Additionally, the NAT management for pfSense seems to be a bit better, as you can NAT between any network segment and not just the LAN segments out the WAN interfaces.
pfSense can be installed on commodity hardware with no licensing fees. With a simple less than 10 minute restore time, on most hardware, it's an extremely inexpensive way to achieve the same results that some of the more expensive vendors provide.
The easy to use interface has allowed configuration management to be preformed by lower level technicians with quick and easy training.
