New Relic vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

New Relic its an excellent tool for monitoring services used on the SAAS universe, like web servers, relational and nosql dbms, reverse proxies, text databases, etc. Its also a powerful tool to monitor resource usage on said servers. However, its not well fitted to monitor custom services - if you need to generate alerts based on logs or database information, for example

Incentivized

I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients

Incentivized

• It gives us insights of applications, infrastructure, clouds very well.
• The alerting system in New Relic helps us to easily identify the root cause which reduces the MTTR.
• It has new features related to AI which helps to troubleshoot any problem in a very short time it gives future predictions also.

Incentivized

• The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
• The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
• Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down

Incentivized

• And while powerful, building tailored dashboards with organ-specific metrics (such as energy load variance across regions) can be difficult to navigate. The UI isn't as drag-and-drop easy, and query-based widgets typically involve some trial and error for non-devs.
• Alerts may be hypersensitive or over general. I We often get a spam of non-critical alerts while doing load testing, all overhauling to me alone and making it difficult to identify actual issues especially in energy systems where spikes are very common.
• With our expanding fleet of Iot devices, the per-host pricing model is becoming expensive, quickly. More detailed billing based on microservices, or that works at sensor level, would make it more adaptable for energy platforms.

Incentivized

• The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

I have given this much rating as I am used New Relic in different sectors and for different use cases like its K8s monitoring, infra monitoring, full stack monitoring as compare to other tools New Relic gives data in a formatted and connected way, and also it is giving us value for money. It also launches new features day by day which helps users to track the issue very quickly. It also supports OTel integrations which is the latest trend of observability tools. thats why I had given this much rating to New Relic.

Incentivized

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Never observed an outage

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

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

Incentivized

Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.

Incentivized

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.

Data Dog has solutions that look more attractive, but not at their price point. We have also tried to build a solution straight from the Cloud, where our business is built, but some things are too hard to replicate. This shows that New Relic is useful and helps our efficiency.

Incentivized

1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem

Incentivized

Agent deployment is easily integrated into our workflow. Adding the agent to new servers is quick and painless

Incentivized

• We were able to quickly identify our most time consuming APIs. In some cases we were able to bring down times for some apis from 4s to 200ms.
• We were able to identify our slowest database queries and optimize them for quicker response times.

Incentivized

• Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
• In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
• Its time to explore other alternatives.