amazon-cloudwatch-vs-new-relic

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.