10 Best New Relic Alternatives in 2023

Introduction

New Relic offers complete monitoring with an intelligent end-to-end Application Performance Monitoring alongside other monitoring and management features such as log management, K8s monitoring, synthetics, and many more.

On the other hand, this overload of features also seems like a significant issue. New Relic's APM is harder to master, especially for a new user or rookie developer, and it's often quite tricky to navigate, even for experienced engineers. Users complain that they are not always sure which New Relic's product handles and what complicates automation and overall workflow. There are also reported issues concerning their laggy UI and slow loading times. All this often results in underutilization of this tool and wasting of resources.

✅ Pros

New Relic started out as an APM Tool and evolved into a full-observability suite
Artificial Intelligence-powered features
Real-time monitoring

❌ Cons

New Relic offers a transparent, but quite expensive pricing model
The number of features makes New Relic really complex and often hard to work with

There are many alternatives to New Relic's APM offering different approaches to APM often delivering a better, less complicated and more reliable solutions to application monitoring. Let's take a look at some of the best in 2023.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is an innovative SQL-compatible structured log management based on ClickHouse. It allows you to start collecting, analyzing, and visualizing logs in real-time. Better Stack collects data from any of the most popular languages and frameworks such as Python and Django, JavaScript and Node.js, PHP, Ruby, .NET, and more. Better Stack helps you to build better software faster with its advanced built-in collaboration features, resource-efficient ClickHouse, and a visually pleasing, dark-mode UI.

Better Stack Logs is a part of the Better Stack ecosystem, and together with Better Stack Uptime, they create a complete observability solution with incident management built-in. With one-click Better Stack Uptime integration, you can easily alert on-call team members of any irregularities in your application's behavior. Be it a specific log message error or a predefined usage trend.

2. ManageEngine Applications Monitor

Applications Manager offers standard APM with support for Java, .Net Core, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby applications. It also provides synthetic transaction monitoring with Selenium-based scripting, real browser checks from Chrome and Firefox, and multiple test locations. Their RUM offers network insights, site, browser, device, and ISP-based performance metrics. Insights into web transactions, user sessions, JavaScript errors, and more. ManageEngine also offers multi-cloud monitoring, server, database, containers and more.

The main disadvantage is its pricing. It's available only in two editions, the professional and enterprise, what makes it unavailable to freelancers and smaller businesses.

3. Azure Monitor

Microsoft Azure Monitor features Application Insights. This APM tool allows you to collect, analyze and evaluate telemetry data from Azure and on-premise environments. Azure's analytic engine creates and simulates predictions and uses retrieved data to reveal hidden patterns and dependencies.

Azure offers a wide range of integrations with tools and software for DevOps, incident management, IT service management, or SIEM.

4. Instana

Instana's Automated Application Performance Monitoring optimizes performance and automatically collects contextualized observability data. It automatically discovers, maps, and monitors all dependencies.

Instana assesses the impact of new deployments and continually monitors the performance of a service in real-time and with automated anomaly detection. Instana also helps you to filter out redundant data and visualizes and monitors only those with real impact on the performance.

5. Sentry.io

Sentry.io offers APM for most languages and language frameworks in a Self-hosted or SaaS solution. It collects, enriches, and analyzes data. Its end-to-end distributed tracing discovers performance issues and helps with root-cause analysis.

Sentry also monitors version changes and the overall impact of any code deployed for the first time. Sentry offers support for a wide range of third-party software.

6. Dynatrace

Dynatrace's APM offers Automated discovery and mapping, end-to-end application observability, mobile, and desktop application monitoring, root-cause and impacts analysis, API monitoring, Application architecture monitoring, service and container monitoring, and end-user experience monitoring.

Dynatrace is a feature-packed observability platform.But, like New Relic is quite expensive and is often quite difficult to grasp initially, and the initial onboarding and integration might require a lot of toil.

7. AppDynamics

AppDynamics offers a complete Application Monitoring Solution offering full observability, enabling you to monitor business-related metrics, user experience, applications, infrastructure, network, and service security. It offers complete visibility into the entire application ecosystem enriched by intelligent insights and instant root-cause analysis to pinpoint the source of issues in real-time. AppDynamics is a part of Cisco.

8. AppOptics

AppOptics offers comprehensive performance monitoring for both on-premises and highly distributed, cloud-based applications. It allows you to combine dashboards to visualize metrics from application and infrastructure in one place and offers consolidated monitoring for all server, host, containers, and serverless environments.

SolarWinds' AppOptics offers Application Performance Monitoring tool for Java, .Net, Python, PHP, Scala, Node.js, Ruby, and Golang applications.

9. Datadog

Datadog collects traces and logs in context and connects distributed traces to data from other monitoring such as infrastructure metrics, network calls, or live processes. Datadog collects insights into recent ingested traces and service dependencies. It leverages ML to create insights and automatically surface error and latency outliers during the live investigation.

Datadog also monitors SLOs, performance trends, and also monitors and identifies KPIs.

Learn more how Datadog and New Relic compare side-by-side here.

10. Splunk

Splunk's APM offers a solution for cloud-native microservice-based apps. Splunk's APM offers auto-instrumentation of popular stacks, including Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, Go, Node.js and PHP. You can also create your own instrumentation using open, standard APIs. Splunk's AI is also capable of mapping root cause errors for better context and triggering service alerts with trace context.

Since Splunk belongs among the founding members and active contributors to OpenTelemetry, Splunk APM supports open, vendor-neutral instrumentation, allowing for even more flexibility.

Best Open Source New Relic APM Alternatives

Open Source solutions are often self-hosted, fully customizable, and community-driven, which can be both blessing and a curse. Let's take a look at some of the best Open Source APM tools in 2023

SigNoz

Built by Uber and then donated to CNCF, Jaeger is a Dapper-inspired, distributed tracing system allowing you to monitor and troubleshoot microservice-based distributed systems. Jaeger supports two open-source NoSQL database backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Jaeger enables you to perform root cause analyses, analyze server dependencies, optimize performance and latency and monitor transactions.

Jaeger

Built by Uber and then donated to CNCF, Jaeger is a Dapper-inspired, distributed tracing system allowing you to monitor and troubleshoot microservice-based distributed systems. Jaeger supports two open-source NoSQL database backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Jaeger allows you to perform root cause analyses, analyze server dependencies, optimize performance and latency and monitor transactions.

The ELK Stack APM

Elastic APM is built upon the ELK stack. It's composed of open source libraries for collecting performance data, a server, receiving performance data, Elasticsearch, and Kibana for visualization.

Conclusion

In this article, we took a closer look at New Relic, one of the best APM monitoring tools on the market. We analyzed its strengths and in the process stumbled upon a few issues, which ask for a list of alternatives. We brought an overview of the Best New Relic's APM alternatives, ranging from freemium to enterprise-focused tools, and added a few open-source APM tools worth trying out.

Other useful resources to explore: