APM: New Relic vs Dynatrace Comparison
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools play a vital role in providing visibility into system behavior, diagnosing performance issues, and supporting proactive performance optimization. Among the leading solutions in this domain, Dynatrace has been widely recognized for its comprehensive monitoring capabilities and detailed performance analytics.
More recently, New Relic has emerged as a prominent APM solution and has gained adoption across enterprise environments. This discussion aims to present a comparative overview of Dynatrace and New Relic, with particular emphasis on their capabilities in monitoring and optimizing performance. The analysis is focused specifically on features and functionality relevant to this technical context.
Deployment Models
With Dynatrace, you get complete operational insights in one powerful platform. From the front-end to the back-end, across infrastructure and cloud, Dynatrace shows you exactly how performance impacts your customers.
New Relic, by contrast, offers cloud deployment only. On the face of it, the cloud is the way forward and represents the future. The pay-per-use model is preferred over upfront capital expenditure, and the cloud deployment model has become the dominant deployment method for packaged applications.
However, there is one area in which the cloud model becomes a constraint. During performance monitoring, developers need the raw details of requests (request parameters, SQL bind values, etc.). The problem is that raw data might contain sensitive information like PII (Personally identifiable information) and PHI (Protected Health Information). From a data security perspective, exposing this sensitive data on the cloud is usually not allowed. With on-premise deployments, exposing such data is allowed, provided adequate access controls are put in place.
Detailed Transaction View
Dynatrace tracks real user experiences, application speed, and system health in real time. Automatic dependency detection and transaction tracing across all tiers ensure you see the full picture. Powered by AI, Dynatrace helps you resolve issues proactively—before they disrupt your business. It monitors your entire hybrid multicloud, tracks applications down to the code, captures real user data, and resolves complaints faster than ever. With actionable AI, Dynatrace helps you eliminate problems in minutes, keeping your customers happy and your systems running flawlessly.
Dynatrace enhances productivity through automated application monitoring across complex environments with thousands of components and dependencies. It delivers end‑to‑end operational visibility without manual configuration, continuously discovers dependencies to lower operational overhead, and provides detailed diagnostics on performance issues—empowering teams to resolve problems before they affect users.
New Relic, on the other hand, samples and reports detailed transaction traces for a few representative transactions, providing an aggregated view. This is perfectly adequate if the scope of APM is limited to the ITOps team.
To summarize: Dynatrace allows data capture and traceability at the individual request level while New Relic provides an aggregated view. This essentially means that New Relic is designed for ITOps performance monitoring, while Dynatrace also supports application functional testing in the development organization.
Plug-ins
An application or a platform is a sum of many parts. It includes multiple software products. Both APM products allow end-users to create a custom product-related plug-in. Dynatrace itself supports an ecosystem for open-source plugins. New Relic does not have so much out-of-the-box support and depends on its open-source or 3rd party plugin ecosystem.
Transaction Visualization
End-users want a visual depiction of how an HTTP web request flows through the various components, and how much time the request spends in each component. This helps in determining normal or abnormal behavior within the application and quickly identifies bottlenecks. Both tools provide such a view. Dynatrace calls it ‘Service Flow’; New Relic calls it ‘Service Maps’.
Here’s what Dynatrace’s Service Flow looks like visually.
This is what New Relic’s Service Maps look like.
I like two things in particular about Dynatrace’s visualization. It shows the time spent and the % contribution against each component. Secondly, it lists all Dynatrace monitored components. New Relic lists applications, external services, and databases. In a typical web application, the web server is an important part of the transaction, but New Relic does not show it in its map.
Data Storage location
Dynatrace offers an on-premise data storage option. This allows organizations to decide how much data they want to store and for how long. New Relic provides a pure cloud storage option, and its data storage policy is standard. Because the storage location is in the cloud, the application team has to be careful about allowing request parameters or query parameters to expose PII/PHI data.
Query Language
New Relic provides a feature called New Relic Query Language (NRQL). This allows end-users to store custom information/attributes and query the stored information. Dynatrace, on the other hand, has Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) to get data, discover patterns, create statistical modeling, identify anomalies and outliers, and more as needed.
Browser Behavior Monitoring
Both Dynatrace and New Relic provide insights into client-side browser response time behavior. New Relic provides a largely aggregated view and highlights some specific slow-performing transactions, while Dynatrace provides a more transaction-level view.
To summarize, if you want to know how your application is performing, New Relic works very well. On the other hand, if you need to determine why the application is slow, you need Dynatrace.
Understand Your Organization’s Requirements
What makes New Relic a compelling offer? In a word, pricing. Dynatrace has a hefty price tag compared to New Relic. My advice is to carefully consider whether the more advanced features provided by Dynatrace are required by your organization. Perhaps the less expensive New Relic has strong enough capabilities to meet the needs of your organization. Additionally, you can view TrustRadius’ comparison page on the two products here, or take a look at the observability software category on TrustRadius for additional software options.
