Monitoring Solutions Comparison

Prometheus vs Datadog vs New Relic - Choose the right monitoring solution

Prometheus + Grafana

4.5

Open source monitoring stack

Free (self-hosted)

Pros

  • Completely free
  • Highly customizable
  • Large community
  • Kubernetes native

Cons

  • Setup complexity
  • Maintenance overhead
  • Limited alerting
  • Storage challenges

Best for: Teams with DevOps expertise

Datadog

4.4

Cloud-native monitoring platform

$15-23/host/month

Pros

  • Easy setup
  • Comprehensive features
  • Great UI/UX
  • Excellent integrations

Cons

  • Expensive at scale
  • Vendor lock-in
  • Complex pricing
  • Data retention limits

Best for: Growing companies with budget

New Relic

4.2

Full-stack observability platform

$25-99/month per user

Pros

  • APM excellence
  • User-friendly
  • Good mobile monitoring
  • AI insights

Cons

  • Expensive
  • Can be overwhelming
  • Limited customization
  • Data sampling

Best for: Application performance monitoring

Feature Comparison

Feature
Prometheus
Datadog
New Relic
Metrics
✅ Excellent
✅ Excellent
✅ Good
Logs
❌ Limited
✅ Excellent
✅ Good
Traces
⚠️ Via Jaeger
✅ Built-in
✅ Excellent
Alerting
⚠️ Basic
✅ Advanced
✅ Good

Cost Considerations

Prometheus + Grafana

Free software but consider infrastructure, maintenance, and expertise costs

Datadog

Predictable monthly costs but can scale quickly with host count and features

New Relic

User-based pricing model, good for small teams but expensive for large organizations