AppDynamics VS New Relic – Which Tool is Right For You? The Complete Guide

New Relic VS AppDynamics: All the performance features, integrations, installation procedures and pricing plans side by side to help you decide which tool to use

When thinking about performance, AppDynamics and New Relic are the main modern tools that come to mind. Both spawned from the same company, Wily Technology, who also dealt with performance monitoring and was acquired by CA back in 2006 - making way to new technology. New Relic is an anagram of Lew Cirne, its founder and CEO. AppDynamics was founded by Jyoti Bansal, who was a Lead Software Architect at the same Wily Technology, which was also founded by Lew. The main goal of this guide is to help you understand the similarities and differences between the two, so you can decide which one fits your company’s needs.

Table of Contents

1. What is APM anyhow?
2. Supported Languages and Environments
3. Features - Backend Monitoring - Fronted & Mobile Monitoring
4. How to Solve the Errors You Find
5. Installation
6. Dashboard and Usage
7. Integrations and Plugins
8. Pricing

Conclusion 

1. What is APM anyhow?

It’s the only buzzword you’ll read in this article, promise. Well, maybe also DevOps, but that’s it. So application Performance Management has been around for a while, though it seems like many developers are not comfortable with it yet. APM provides us with analytics around our application’s performance - at the core this means timing how long it takes to execute different areas in the code and complete transactions - this is done either by instrumenting the code, monitoring logs, or including network / hardware metrics. 

On top of this basic concept, many different implementations exist - but there are a basic truths we can agree on: A modern solution should monitor production environments, so its overhead (in terms of CPU and throughput) becomes very important. Also, it should display what the web/mobile end users are experiencing, which was not part of traditional APMs. 

What was once considered a luxury is becoming commonplace: Rapid new deployments in production mean more chances to introduce errors to your systems architecture, slow it down, and maybe even crash it. Let’s see what AppDynamics and New Relic have in store for us.

2. Supported Environments

AppDynamics: Java, Scala, .NET, PHP, Node.js, iOS and Android; including your favorite flavour of database and cloud platform. New Relic: Java, Scala, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Ruby and Python. Supported databases, cloud platforms and other plug-ins are available here. We’ll dig in deeper with extensions later on. On the user monitoring front, iOS, Android, and JavaScript support is included with both tools. Bottom line: Main difference here is New Relic’s Ruby and Python support, and different levels of support for various platforms.

3. Features

Both New Relic and AppDynamics can be broken down into 6 different products, all reporting to a main dashboard interface. Let’s split these to backend, mobile and frontend to do a quick runthrough over the main offerings.

Backend Monitoring

The bread and butter of performance management - reporting stats, graphs and insights of your applications performance under the hood. AppDynamics and NewRelic each offer 4 approaches here: Application Performance Management High level metrics with drill downs to code level data about how your application is performing. Must have metrics include transaction response time, error rate, throughput (Requests per Minute) on NewRelic and load (calls/min) on AppDynamics. 

AppDynamics dashboard on the left, New Relic on the Right 

You’ve probably noticed the main screen at AppDynamics include a map of the services the application is using with their call loads and health index while NewRelic displays a response time graph. This might be a way to signal each tool’s monitoring priorities and AppDynamics inclination to larger enterprises. Anyhow, enough with this dev tool psychology, but it’s worth noting that a similar map is also available on New Relic: 

New Relic’s application map 

One of the thorny issues here is alerting and reporting, with so many metrics and moving parts, it’s hard to identify which matters most. Is it a low error rate? Responsiveness? Throughput? AppDynamics and New Relic each took a different approach to distill these metrics into performance indicators. New Relic is using the Apdex score index, which uses a user defined response time threshold T to imply end-user satisfaction. Simply put, they require you to manually set the threshold. Here’s an example for the way this score is calculated:

 
Calculating Apdex, now sum this over all requests for a given time and you’ll get the score 

AppDynamics on the other hand, doesn’t believe in Apdex (as they explained in an article called ”Apdex is Fatally Flawed”). They’ve come up with a solution of their own that automatically creates a dynamic baseline for the apps performance which varies by time. For example, the definition of a slow transaction might vary under low and high loads on the system. Bottom line: We’re seeing that AppDynamics puts its priority on visualizing the stack from end to end, while NewRelic is focused on bottom line response times. We’ve also seen the difference in alerting with Apdex and a dynamic baselines. Server Monitoring Another monitoring capability offered by both tools focuses on the hardware your servers run on: specs, CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O and network IO. 

AppDynamics on the left, New Relic on the right with some sample data 

In this category, AppDynamics offers a few more features than New Relic, mostly around memory: heap size & utilization, garbage collection stats divided by gens and memory leak detection. 

AppDynamics Server Monitoring - Memory features

Bottom line: AppDynamics provides deeper insights into garbage collection and memory leak detection beyond the standard metrics. 

Database Monitoring 

Moving on to other components in your stack, the first thing that comes to mind is the database. Here we have a greater distinction with a richer AppDynamics dashboard looking into things like resource consumption, wait states, user sessions, specific query calls and more. On New Relic’s end the situation is a bit different with the Database dashboard as part of the basic APM product. Both tools have specific database monitoring metrics available through plugins to view data from external services (we’ll talk a bit more about integrations later). Either way, both native and external feature sets here might be different depending on the database you use. 

AppDynamics on the left with an Oracle DB, New Relic on the right with MySQL plugin

Bottom line: Beyond the shared database metrics that go a bit deeper with AppDynamics, it’s worth looking into the features available for your specific database within each tool. 

Insights and Analytics 

This one is a wildcard, going beyond traditional APM and opening up to business intelligence metrics. Since both New Relic and AppDynamics already have access to the messages that go through your application, they’ve built this opt-in additional database to store your stats and enable you to query them. 

AppDynamics on the left, New Relic on the right with some sample data

Bottom line: If you don’t have a solution that already allows you to process such queries, it might be about time to get one.

Frontend & Mobile Monitoring

Switching seats from the backend, lets take a quick look at what we’re getting on the Real-User Monitoring front. Both AppDynamics and New Relic have a product targeting browsers and a product targeting mobile with iOS & Android support. On Mobile, the flagship features include insights on slowdowns and crashes, that are filtered through geographic regions, devices, operating systems and operator networks: 

AppDynamics on the left, New Relic on the right - Mobile Real-User Monitoring 

With end-user browser analytics, it feels like having the visibility you have on your browsers load times through Chrome dev tools available on the actual users of your app:

AppDynamics on the left, New Relic on the right - Browser Real-User Monitroing

Bottom line: We’re seeing again how New Relic’s focus is on response time bottom lines while AppDynamics emphasizes the global picture.

4. How to Solve the errors you find

To go beyond the reporting and alerting of errors by AppDynamics and New Relic, many of our users add Takipi to their toolbox. This allows them not only to monitor server slowdowns and errors via New Relic or AppDynamics, but also to solve them using Takipi. Whenever a new exception is thrown or a log error occurs - Takipi captures it and shows you the variable state which caused it, across methods and machines. Takipi will overlay this over the actual code which executed at the moment of error – so you can analyze the exception as if you were there when it happened. The dashboard links each error to a recorded instance of all involved code when the bug happened, and includes the variable values that caused it: 

 

Takipi plays well with AppDynamics, and it also has a New Relic plug-in that displays an exception and log error dashboard:

Takipi for New Relic 

Bottom line: It’s one thing to identify what’s stopping you down, but solving it, is a whole different issue. Java or Scala developers? Whether you're using an APM tool or not, try Takipi.