Custom Monitoring Solutions vs New Relic

Developers should learn or use custom monitoring solutions when standard monitoring tools like Prometheus or Datadog cannot meet specific requirements, such as monitoring proprietary applications, integrating with legacy systems, or handling unique data formats meets developers should use new relic when building or maintaining applications that require high availability, performance optimization, and proactive issue detection, such as in e-commerce, saas, or microservices architectures. Here's our take.

Custom Monitoring Solutions

Nice Pick

Developers should learn or use custom monitoring solutions when standard monitoring tools like Prometheus or Datadog cannot meet specific requirements, such as monitoring proprietary applications, integrating with legacy systems, or handling unique data formats

Pros

• They are essential in environments where granular control over metrics, real-time analytics, or compliance with strict security policies is needed, enabling teams to gain deeper insights and respond faster to incidents
• Related to: prometheus, grafana

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

New Relic

Developers should use New Relic when building or maintaining applications that require high availability, performance optimization, and proactive issue detection, such as in e-commerce, SaaS, or microservices architectures

Pros

• It is particularly valuable for teams adopting DevOps practices, as it integrates with CI/CD pipelines and provides actionable insights to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and improve user experience through features like APM, infrastructure monitoring, and AI-powered alerts
• Related to: application-performance-monitoring, observability

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Custom Monitoring Solutions is a tool while New Relic is a platform. We picked Custom Monitoring Solutions based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Custom Monitoring Solutions wins

Based on overall popularity. Custom Monitoring Solutions is more widely used, but New Relic excels in its own space.