Amazon CloudWatch vs. New Relic

Amazon CloudWatch

New Relic

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Amazon CloudWatch	Score 8.2 out of 10	N/A	Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.	$0 per canary run
New Relic	Score 7.8 out of 10	N/A	New Relic is a SaaS-based web and mobile application performance management provider for the cloud and the datacenter. They provide code-level diagnostics for dedicated infrastructures, the cloud, or hybrid environments and real time monitoring.	$0 No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks

Pricing

Amazon CloudWatch

New Relic

Editions & Modules

Canaries: $0.0012
per canary run
Logs - Analyze (Logs Insights queries): $0.005
per GB of data scanned
Over 1,000,000 Metrics: $0.02
per month
Contributor Insights - Matched Log Events: $0.02
per month per one million log events that match the rule
Logs - Store (Archival): $0.03
per GB
Next 750,000 Metrics: $0.05
per month
Next 240,000 Metrics: $0.10
per month
Alarm - Standard Resolution (60 Sec): $0.10
per month per alarm metric
First 10,000 Metrics: $0.30
per month
Alarm - High Resolution (10 Sec): $0.30
per month per alarm metric
Alarm - Composite: $0.50
per month per alarm
Logs - Collect (Data Ingestion): $0.50
per GB
Contributor Insights: $0.50
per month per rule
Events - Custom: $1.00
per million events
Events - Cross-account: $1.00
per million events
CloudWatch RUM: $1
per 100k events
Dashboard: $3.00
per month per dashboard
CloudWatch Evidently - Events: $5
per 1 million events
CloudWatch Evidently - Analysis Units: $7.50
per 1 million analysis units

Free (Forever): $0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Telemetry Data Platform: $0.25
per month per extra GB data ingest (after first free 100GB per month)
Incident Intelligence: $0.50
per month per event (after first 1000 free events per month)
Standard: $99
per month per full user (after first free full user - unlimited free basic users)
Pro: Contact sales team
Enterprise: Contact sales team

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatch	New Relic
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Amazon CloudWatch	New Relic
Considered Both Products	Amazon CloudWatch Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch If you use AWS, then just use CloudWatch, as it's tightly integrated. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and … Incentivized Helpful? Mayank Thirani Senior Software Engineer Chose Amazon CloudWatch Datadog Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch In comparison to its competitors, Amazon CloudWatch is efficient, reliable, and has a fast response time, and it maximizes an application's life while also providing the best load balance and storage. The services that Amazon CloudWatch provides are far better and cheaper for … Incentivized Helpful? Rob Domenico Senior Systems Administrator Chose Amazon CloudWatch We have also tested with SolarWinds NPM, and Zoho Monitors. They seemed to work fine and setup was not as involved as Amazon services, JSON, etc. However, the issue of upgrades made the other solutions incur more downtime overall for maintenance and software upgrades via the … Incentivized Helpful? Apurv Doshi Senior Solutions Architect Chose Amazon CloudWatch I think there is no alternative of [Amazon] CloudWatch service. However it provides lot of glue points which you can use to show different metrics, trigger events and update your dashboards. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch I believe that CloudWatch is a better solution to use with AWS services and resources in terms of cost and ease of integration with AWS infrastructure services. But keep in mind that Elasticsearch is better at aggregating application-level metrics. We chose CloudWatch because of … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch You can create very easily particular alarms. Incentivized Helpful? Ramindu Deshapriya Lead Consultant - Technology Chose Amazon CloudWatch We found that CloudWatch is the best solution to use with AWS services in terms of cost and ease of integration with AWS infrastructure services. While Elasticsearch is better at aggregating application-level metrics, CloudWatch wins out in its capabilities to tightly integrate … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch CloudWatch is the minimum viable product that is used as your baseline. Once you graduate beyond the basic needs, there is a wide range of tools from other AWS partners that go well above and beyond. However the cost of those tools is typically considerably more. Incentivized Helpful? Diego Turcios Lara Devops Engineer Chose Amazon CloudWatch We thought about using Logstash for capturing our data. But we encountered several configuration issues, so as I mentioned before, if you're using AWS, the best way to do this is using the service they offer, as you don't encounter configuration problems. This is why I consider … Incentivized Helpful? Gedson Silva Senior Production Engineer Chose Amazon CloudWatch CloudWatch's native integration with other AWS tools such as AWS and Lambda make it a better fit and simpler to set up than most of the competitors. Incentivized Helpful? Jose Adan Ortiz Sales Engineer Chose Amazon CloudWatch I think Amazon has put more efforts to develop AWS CloudWatch features to monitor each kind of AWS service you can use instead of Dynatrace One Agent that just can monitor some variables of Computing services and FaaS, unless Dynatrace One Agent integration with AWS CloudWatch … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch Nagios is nice, but not as coupled with AWS cloud as CloudWatch. You might even think of cases you would use them both. Incentivized Helpful? Xialin Zhu Engineering Manager Chose Amazon CloudWatch AWS is still a more mature product overall and offers more features compared to other cloud platforms like Google. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch Out of the box monitoring which compliments workloads implemented from infrastructure as code so we have standardized metrics across all our monitoring for our AWS workloads. Also incredibly easy to implement via the console which can be done in minutes oppose to hours of … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch We choose Amazon CloudWatch because, first, we use AWS and we need a monitoring tool. That is why we considered CloudWatch as soon as we started deploying AWS services to our company. Second, CloudWatch is a great, handy tool to monitor our services. Its strength is obvious … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch Currently, we only tried and used Cloud Watch, but for AWS it is perfect. Since this is an Amazon product monitoring Amazon services, integration is great. If we decide in the future to move away from AWS, we would reconsider changing alarm monitoring. AWS can be costly … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch Amazon CloudWatch is fully integrated into your existing AWS account, and provides easy hooks into several different services to make a cohesive infrastructure. Unfortunately, using other services will not allow you to get into the weeds to do everything Amazon CloudWatch can … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch It's cheap and we use other AVS services. And for us, it is better to use AWS services for faster and easier adjustment. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch CloudWatch is incredibly cheap compared to new relic and much more intuitive and easy to use than Nagios. It requires no setup, expertise, or otherwise extensive knowledge to use. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch We used to use Miscosoft Azure, however when we came across Amazon CloudWatch, and all the features it can provide, it seemd no brainer to switch. We transitioned from Azure to CloudWatch within 2 years of using Azure, And may not go back. Hopefully Amazon will keep adding more … Incentivized Helpful? Kevin Van Heusen Software Architect Chose Amazon CloudWatch Amazon CloudWatch is great in terms of the CloudWatch Logs feature, it integrates easily with other AWS services (CloudFormation, S3, Lambda, etc.) and is reasonably low cost, so it was a no-brainer for that area. For alerting, CloudWatch didn't offer much in the way of … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon CloudWatch I feel that CloudWatch will always remain the backbone of log analytics, events, and alarms. However, we can use other products in conjunction with it for better log analytics and monitoring. In my organization, we also ingest logs from CloudWatch to Splunk and ELK. This way we … Incentivized Helpful?	New Relic AY Adarsh YS Frontend Developer Chose New Relic Datadog Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic Prometheus, Grafana, Grafana Loki and Elasticsearch Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic New Relic has full stack visibility and gives us all options for observability like one stop shop. It gives you front end, backend as well synthetic monitoring capabilities. Every other feature built into one cost model (usually) which ties to data that you send, it helps you … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic New Relic stood out to us primarily because of its all-in one approach, combining APM, infra monitoring, logs and alerts in single platform. Compared to other tools we evaluated, if offered a smoother on boarding experience and required less stitching together of different … Incentivized Helpful? Anubhav Malik CTO Chose New Relic Less expensive than datadog and sentry with almost everything we need. Less effort to set up and maintain than elastic search and kibana so saved a ton on engineering bandwidth which would have otherwise been lost. Incentivized Helpful? Sergiu Cazac Founder Chose New Relic Solarwinds was good until they migrated to a new kind of offering and discounting the old product making it more expensive and less flexible for our specific use-case. The free trial also helped me try and get started without needing to commit. I think right now New Relic is the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic New Relic is the easiest to adopt, the price is in line with the other tools, and it has the lowest threshold to cross in order to learn the system and the platform. Adopting OpenTelemetry has been helpful in getting data aligned, and their documentation has been sufficient for … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic The New Relic Platform addresses this challenge with the new plugin architecture. Plugins provide a way to monitor each of these technologies, extending the New Relic interface with custom-made dashboards specific to each. They pair the reporting of metrics specific to the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic every one is using New Relic Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic We selected TrackJS for error monitoring and New Relic for site speed monitoring. TrackJS is a much easier to use tool for JS error monitoring, so we never ended up consolidating tools or moving over to New Relic permanently. We use New Relic for site speed monitoring and … Incentivized Helpful? GS Greg Smith Lead Developer Chose New Relic New Relic is the most full-featured offering that we've found, and is incredibly easy to start using with a PHP app. The New Relic agent is installed as a PHP extension so it is able to monitor and track the performance of any PHP app being run by the web server. Other tools … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic At the time, we selected New Relic for the broad coverage it could provide over our landscape. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic New Relic is used by developers and support teams at our organisation - Splunk is used more in security monitoring by our SecOps team - not sure how they might compare doing the same job Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic Similar features, the New Relic data ingestion costs are better and UI better as well Incentivized Helpful? Tommy Harke VP, Engineering Chose New Relic New Relic in my opinion is a lot better than a tool like Datadog and Splunk. Cost in my opinion is the biggest concern. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic The overlap is not large, but the one advantage of the speed curve is retention: data is available permanently, which allows you to investigate the hypothesis with data collected before formulating the hypothesis. This has proven very effective for us. Incentivized Helpful? Aman Makwana DevOps Engineer Chose New Relic Dynatrace and Dynatrace Kubernetes Monitoring (Discontinued) Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic 10 years ago we used AppDynamics onpremise but the cost was too high and we migrated to New Relic, more economical and modern Incentivized Helpful? Piyush Goel Senior Vice President - Engineering Chose New Relic New Relic's APM is better than Datadog's. It has better traces and dashboards. The Apdex-based alerts are accurate and work predictably even at a large scale. However, New Relic can become expensive as the volume of data ingested grows. Datadog has better dashboards and … Incentivized Helpful? VR Vishal Ranjan Senior Storage Administrator Chose New Relic PRTG and Nagios are decent products themselves; however, when compared to New Relic, they fell short on all fronts. New Relic provided a wide variety of features that the other tools didn't provide. Adding\removing devices in New Relic was quite easy and can be done with a few … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic New Relic has been DevOps and Developer friendly to onboard and use. Also pricing-wise, it is one of the best in terms of ROI. There are few features better in other APM solutions but New Relic is working on new features faster recently. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic 50/50 Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic New Relic has a native integration with the IaaS service that the company utilizes which made it very easy to set up, integrate, and it also has consolidated billing with that IaaS service which is a big plus for the organization. After evaluating, I also thought it had the … Incentivized Helpful? FM Frank Mair Technical Specialist Chose New Relic New Relic had the most comprehensive solution and easier integration path. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose New Relic We selected New Relic since it was very dynamic and versatile to use. It works well in all aspects of monitoring, and observability and would allow having a focus on collaboration with different repeatable processes. Also, New Relic has a good focus on working well with CLI, … Incentivized Helpful?

TrustRadius Insights
	Amazon CloudWatch	New Relic
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published July 2, 2020 Amazon Cloudwatch and New Relic are both used to monitor IT resources. Amazon Cloudwatch is a cloud management suite built to help IT teams monitor and manage all resources supported by their cloud infrastructure. Amazon Cloudwatch is used most often by mid-sized businesses and larger enterprises with many cloud resources. In contrast, New Relic is an application performance management tool that helps businesses keep track of and optimize the performance of their businesses applications. Features Amazon Cloudwatch and New Relic both help users monitor their applications, but they also have a few standout features that are important to consider. Amazon Cloudwatch is a monitoring tool that supports all resources that use AWS. In addition to monitoring the resource consumption and performance of cloud applications, Amazon Cloudwatch also collects data on cloud resource consumption and automate management tasks. Users of Amazon Cloudwatch can also use the software to ensure their data is compliant with regulatory guidelines such as GDPR and HIPAA. New Relic is a powerful application monitoring tool that can monitor any application while providing pre-built dashboards and analytics models. Additionally, New Relic has built in support for many cloud applications, making it a viable choice for cloud applications and on premise solutions. For business with multiple applications to monitor, New Relic also provides a unified interface for managing the entire IT infrastructure. Limitations Though Amazon Cloudwatch and New Relic both help businesses to monitor their applications, they have a few limitations that are important to consider. Amazon Cloudwatch allows organizations to support all their cloud resources through AWS, but it lacks support for non-AWS tools or on premise applications. Additionally, while Amazon Cloudwatch can provide detailed cloud insights, it doesn’t have the robust application monitoring features offered by New Relic. Businesses looking specifically for an application performance monitoring tool may find more success with New Relic. New Relic provides excellent features for application monitoring, but doesn’t support an AWS infrastructure as well as Amazon Cloudwatch. Businesses looking to get insights on their cloud resources, such as uptime, performance may prefer a cloud management tool like Amazon Cloudwatch. Additionally, a business making use of AWS technologies may get more use out of a dedicated AWS monitoring tool. Pricing AWS Cloudwatch is priced depending on what metrics the business needs. There is a free version for users that only need to monitor a small amount of resources. New Relic offers an essentials pricing package for $12.50 per month that retains application data for a few days. The pro package, which costs $25.00 per month, retains application data for three months.

Best Alternatives
	Amazon CloudWatch	New Relic
Small Businesses	InfluxDB Score 8.8 out of 10	InfluxDB Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Logz.io Score 7.0 out of 10	Logz.io Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprises	NetBrain Technologies Score 9.2 out of 10	NetBrain Technologies Score 9.2 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Amazon CloudWatch	New Relic
Likelihood to Recommend	7.7 (0 ratings)	6.6 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	7.0 (0 ratings)	8.8 (0 ratings)
Availability	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Performance	- (0 ratings)	8.2 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	8.4 (0 ratings)	7.5 (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)
Configurability	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Ease of integration	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Product Scalability	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale	- (0 ratings)	7.3 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Amazon CloudWatch	New Relic
Likelihood to Recommend	If you use any AWS services, CloudWatch is the natural choice to monitor & troubleshoot your workload. Thankfully, for most AWS services, CloudWatch is either built-in or very easy to set up. However, being proficient in browsing & tracking the log events would take some training & practice. Having some experienced people on the team would help immensely, especially in spreading the skill to the rest of the team. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	It is perfect for observing our energy platforms during high-load situations, such as grid demand spikes, or our real-time ingest of sensor data, allowing us to respond in real time to anomalies. And it’s a good way to monitor API performance in client dashboards, too. But it’s not as conducive for low-budget/low-code work or deep customization that doesn’t get ample development support given its complexity and expense. Incentivized AJ Alex Jones Energy Engineer Read full review
Pros	It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc. It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time. If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent. Incentivized Apurv Doshi Senior Solutions Architect Read full review	Capturing Front end Metrics specially web vitals and setting up alerts for violations really helps. NRQL is great tool to fetch the data you need. With queries you can pull the data and put the data by table or by chart. You can even trend graphs and create dashboards. Synthetic Monitoring is very helpful for proactive monitoring. You can use it for user journeys by using scripted browser monitor type or just check availability using PING type. ASk AI is great addition that can fetch details you need with natuaral language Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used. Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana. By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Support for SQL like query with more functional features of analysis while viewing distributed tracing. support for very low level specific integration from APIs to classes to functions to piece of code More detailed documentation, as we faced issues while integrating for the first time. Incentivized Ratnesh Chandak Member of Techincal Staff Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	I have not yet found any similar product that offers me this range of features to help us keep our online service fast and reliable. Besides this, New Relic is constantly evolving by adding new plugins to emerging technologies and platforms. Server performance measuring features are a key point as our user database grows. Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	Although the tool itself is easy to integrate and is readily available for use, it has its limitations. The key limitations of cloudwatch are with respect to cost incurred on log retention and log querying. While for key use cases this is sufficient, for more advanced use cases, Amazon CloudWatch doesn't work out. Also, obviously it is tightly coupled with AWS, which makes you look away if you need a single tool for all monitoring Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	New Relic helps in observability setup for the critical environments and getting known about the issues and troubleshoot the applications and services. Alerts helps in knowing the abnormal state of the system and services, Dashboards are used for visualizing the key metrics and muting the unwanted notifications and dropping the extra data from the source. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Reliability and Availability	No answers on this topic	Never observed an outage Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Performance	No answers on this topic	Always responsive. Never observed slow page loads Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use. Incentivized Ramindu Deshapriya Lead Consultant - Technology Read full review	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 Piyush Goel Senior Vice President - Engineering Read full review
Implementation Rating	No answers on this topic	The documentation was clear and concise; the only issue we ran into was custom application naming. Due to HTTPD mod_fcgid and the need for the application name to be set in php.ini (not in .htaccess or the virtual host directive) ... we had issues setting this up. Travis Crowder Systems Engineer Read full review
Alternatives Considered	We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more prominent platforms for wider analysis, including Service desk support, SecOps, and ITOps monitoring within the organization. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Its covers all the observability aspects as well as giving us more competitive pricing models compared to other providers that's why I like to use New Relic in place of other tools. And also it introduces new Agentic AI features as well as it adopts AI in its RCA. As an observability tool it should reduce the RCA of any problem and New Relic is continuously focusing on that that's why I am preferring New Relic in place of other tools. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Scalability	No answers on this topic	Agent deployment is easily integrated into our workflow. Adding the agent to new servers is quick and painless Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized. Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require. Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI. Incentivized Rob Domenico Senior Systems Administrator Read full review	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 Anubhav Malik CTO Read full review
ScreenShots	Amazon CloudWatch Screenshots

Features

Limitations

Pricing