Datadog vs New Relic
March 20, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
17★
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Operations and Development teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
20★
New Relic gets you immediate code-level visibility to build faster software, create better products, and delight your customers. New Relic gets you immediate code-level visibility to build faster software, create better products, and delight your customers.
See also:
Top 10 IT Monitoring software
Top 10 IT Monitoring software
Imagine, if you will, two omnipresent, all-seeing digital overlords of the modern cloud world: Datadog and New Relic. Both of them claim to offer a unified view of the chaotic, unpredictable mess that is your IT infrastructure. They ingest vast quantities of logs, metrics and traces, process them through mysterious AI-powered black boxes and then inform you—usually with an alarming red alert—that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong. Both cater to DevOps, SREs and anyone else foolish enough to think they can predict the behavior of distributed systems. They integrate seamlessly with every major cloud platform, ensuring that your technical debt remains observable, if not necessarily solvable.
Datadog, born in 2010, decided early on that infrastructure monitoring was its calling and, over the years, bolted on everything from security analytics to log management. It’s particularly fond of Kubernetes, which is a good thing, because Kubernetes is particularly fond of breaking in unpredictable ways. With a modular pricing system that ensures you only pay for the exact number of features you never quite manage to use, it has become the go-to choice for those who enjoy finely-tuned chaos with a side of dashboards.
New Relic, on the other hand, emerged in 2008 with a burning passion for application performance monitoring and a belief that developers, too, should suffer under the weight of too much data. It consolidated everything into New Relic One, a unified platform designed to give you all the insights you could ever need—assuming, of course, that you can make sense of them. Unlike Datadog’s à la carte pricing, New Relic prefers a single user-based model, ensuring that the cost of understanding your own software remains a delightful mystery. Also, it embraces OpenTelemetry, which is like Esperanto for telemetry data—elegant in theory, but mostly just confusing in practice.
See also: Top 10 IT Monitoring software
Datadog, born in 2010, decided early on that infrastructure monitoring was its calling and, over the years, bolted on everything from security analytics to log management. It’s particularly fond of Kubernetes, which is a good thing, because Kubernetes is particularly fond of breaking in unpredictable ways. With a modular pricing system that ensures you only pay for the exact number of features you never quite manage to use, it has become the go-to choice for those who enjoy finely-tuned chaos with a side of dashboards.
New Relic, on the other hand, emerged in 2008 with a burning passion for application performance monitoring and a belief that developers, too, should suffer under the weight of too much data. It consolidated everything into New Relic One, a unified platform designed to give you all the insights you could ever need—assuming, of course, that you can make sense of them. Unlike Datadog’s à la carte pricing, New Relic prefers a single user-based model, ensuring that the cost of understanding your own software remains a delightful mystery. Also, it embraces OpenTelemetry, which is like Esperanto for telemetry data—elegant in theory, but mostly just confusing in practice.
See also: Top 10 IT Monitoring software