New Relic vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

New Relic and Prometheus are two popular monitoring and observability tools used in the software industry. Let's explore the key differences between New Relic and Prometheus:

Architecture: New Relic follows a centralized architecture, collecting data from monitored systems and sending it to the cloud. Agents are installed on systems for data collection. Prometheus, on the other hand, has a decentralized architecture, deploying exporters on each system to scrape metrics directly for storage and analysis.

Data Collection: New Relic supports diverse data collection methods, with built-in instrumentation for programming languages and frameworks. It offers automatic discovery and monitoring of application components, collecting metrics, traces, logs, and events. Prometheus focuses on metric collection through a pull-based model, scraping metrics from exporters at regular intervals. It also supports custom instrumentation through client libraries.

Scalability: New Relic is designed for large-scale deployments, offering automatic scaling in its cloud infrastructure. It efficiently handles data collection from numerous systems. Prometheus requires manual scaling and configuration as a self-hosted solution, relying on hardware and resources allocated to the server and exporters. Additional Prometheus instances can be deployed for workload distribution.

Data Storage and Retention: New Relic stores monitoring data in the cloud, optimized for query performance. It offers long-term retention options and features like aggregation, filtering, and alerting. Prometheus stores metrics in a local time-series database, allowing configurable retention periods. It focuses on storing raw data for detailed analysis rather than aggregating it.

Alerting and Visualization: New Relic provides robust alerting with customizable thresholds and real-time notification mechanisms. It integrates with popular communication channels and offers visualization tools like dashboards and reports. Prometheus has a built-in alerting system based on metric thresholds and supports alerts via different channels. It provides a basic web interface for visualization and querying, often used with Grafana for advanced visualization.

Integration and Ecosystem: New Relic has a rich integration ecosystem, offering APIs, SDKs, and a marketplace for third-party extensions. It integrates with various technologies such as cloud platforms, databases, and messaging systems. Prometheus also has a growing ecosystem, with integrations and exporters for popular systems and services. It has a strong integration with Grafana, which enhances visualization and querying capabilities.