New Relic vs Sentry - Which Monitoring Tool to Choose? [2024]

Monitoring tools are essential for developers to maintain application performance and quickly resolve issues. Choosing the right one requires understanding how different tools align with your needs and budget. In this blog, I have compared two popular tools, focusing on their strengths, common features, and unique differences.

By knowing these aspects, you will be better equipped to select the tool that fits your requirements. By the end, I have introduced an alternative that could be a game-changer for simplifying your monitoring setup and getting the most value for your investment.

In this blog post:

1. Tool overview
2. Product Overview
3. New Relic vs Sentry: Key Differences and Common Features
4. Initial Setup
5. Application Performance Monitoring(APM)
6. Error Monitoring
7. Session Replay
8. Pricing
9. When to Choose New Relic vs Sentry
10. An alternative to New Relic and Sentry: Atatus

Tool Overview

What is New Relic?

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that provides real-time insights into your applications and infrastructure. It helps engineers monitor performance by analyzing metrics, logs, and traces from various sources.

With over 30 capabilities and 750+ integrations, it simplifies debugging and performance optimization. Powered by AI, New Relic enhances system reliability and operational efficiency. It offers a comprehensive, all-in-one view of your digital ecosystem.

What is Sentry?

Sentry is a developer-first platform for error tracking and performance monitoring, offering real-time insights into application issues. It helps software teams identify what matters most, resolve problems faster, and continuously improve.

Available as both self-hosted and cloud-based solutions, Sentry enhances visibility into errors and application performance. By providing clear diagnostics, it streamlines the debugging process. Sentry empowers developers to maintain efficient and reliable software systems.

Product overview

New Relic: Product overview

• APM (Application Performance Monitoring): Monitors the performance and availability of applications to ensure optimal functionality and user experience.
• Digital Experience Monitoring: Tracks and analyzes user interactions with digital platforms through real user monitoring, synthetics, web performance, and session replay.
• Infrastructure: Oversees the health and performance of infrastructure components including servers, Kubernetes, networks, and cloud services (Google Cloud, Azure, AWS).
• Security: Provides integrated monitoring to detect and respond to security threats and vulnerabilities.
• Artificial Intelligence: Utilizes AI to deliver insights and detect anomalies in application and system performance.
• Logs: Aggregates and analyzes log data from various sources to support troubleshooting and performance monitoring.

Sentry: Product overview

• Error Monitoring: Provides actionable insights to track, debug, and resolve code-related issues across any language or framework.
• Session Replay: Allows you to quickly identify issues by replaying real user sessions with privacy controls.
• Tracing: Follows the complete path of a request through systems and services to identify the specific function or API call causing issues.
• Profiling: Delivers code-level performance insights for your application while it's in production.
• Cron Monitoring: Alerts you to failed or flaky cron jobs, helping you identify and fix issues in your code.
• Code Coverage: Highlights untested or partially covered code directly in your stack trace to prevent future errors.
• User Feedback: Gathers real-time user feedback with debugging context, including session replay and device tags, to diagnose issues and their impact.

New Relic vs Sentry: Key Differences and Common Features

From the product overview, it is evident that both tools offer distinctly different products, but comparing them helps figure out which one works best for you and to understand their complementary strengths.

Initial Setup

New Relic

New Relic gave me a free account to explore all its features without any limits. To set it up on my host, I followed an easy APM installation guide. It included a code snippet for installing an infrastructure agent with logging. The automated script made the setup process straightforward, and New Relic started tracking performance right away.

Sentry

Setting up Sentry for my demo app with a Python backend was really straightforward. After I created a project in Sentry, I received a DSN key that I added to my code. This simple step ensured that errors were automatically reported to Sentry. The whole process was quick and required very little effort, making it easy to get started.

Application Performance Monitoring(APM)

New Relic

I signed up for a New Relic account and installed the language agent for my app. After that, I just needed to generate some traffic to my app and log into my New Relic account. Within minutes, I started seeing data come in. The basic dashboards on the APM Summary page gave me a quick overview of my app’s performance without any need for customization.

New Relic APM 360,  provided real-time insights into key health indicators across the entire stack using APM summary tiles. It showed issues, deployments, service levels, and vulnerabilities all in one place, so I didn't need to switch screens to monitor overall service health and spot emerging issues early.

Sentry

Sentry APM tracked metrics like throughput and latency, and showed how errors impacted various services. I liked how it captured distributed traces of transactions and spans, making it easy to see how each part of my app was performing.

The Performance page had plenty of filters and display options, so I could focus on the data that mattered most. When I had my app set up for performance monitoring, Sentry would automatically find common issues and group them, similar to how it handled errors.

In the comparison between New Relic APM vs. Sentry APM, New Relic APM clearly excels by offering deeper and more comprehensive insights into application performance. Sentry's APM features are more limited in scope.

Error Monitoring

New Relic

After setting up my errors inbox, I was able to start proactively monitoring all the errors across my stack. I found that error groups are stored long-term and provide metrics, activity logs, discussions, and basic details about each unique error. What happens is that error events sharing the same fingerprint are grouped into a single error group.

As New Relic ingests events, it processes them through a set of managed rules to produce a fingerprint. Each unique fingerprint corresponds to one error group. When I click into a specific error group from the errors inbox, a pop-up view provides the full context of the issue. It made troubleshooting a lot simpler for me.

Sentry

To start with, I created a new project in Sentry, got the code, and installed the SDK in my application. I just installed the dependencies and ran the demo app. Once the SDK was initialized in my code, it automatically began capturing unhandled errors and sending real-time notifications without needing additional configuration. For handled errors, Sentry provides specific methods to explicitly report issues.

One of the useful features I found was the ability to add custom tags and user context, allowing me to enrich error data and get more detailed insights. This combination of automated tracking and the flexibility to customize reporting gave me full control over how I monitor and respond to errors in my application.

Both tools offer strong error monitoring, If your priority is getting the most out of error monitoring, Sentry is the better choice.

Session Replay

New Relic

To enable session replay, I navigated to one.newrelic.com and selected All Capabilities > Browser. After choosing my browser app, I scrolled down to the left-hand menu and clicked on Session replay. I then reviewed each session replay to understand activities.

I encountered an error in my sample application where there was an issue in the shipping process. This helped me quickly identify and fix the root cause of the problem. I found session replays in two places: on the Session replay page and on the Errors inbox page.

Sentry

Setting up session replay in Sentry isn’t as straightforward . Before I could get started, I had to ensure I had the Sentry browser SDK package, or an equivalent framework SDK like @sentry/react, installed. The setup took a lot of time, primarily because I needed to install, configure the SDK, and integrate session replay into my app.

Once everything was in place, watching user interactions through videos and breadcrumbs really improved my debugging. Exploring Sentry’s session replay and its advanced settings made tracking and fixing errors much easier.

When comparing New Relic vs. Sentry for session replay, New Relic is the better choice due to its comprehensive session replay features.

Pricing

New Relic Pricing

New Relic provides usage-based pricing with 100GB of free data ingestion per month. Once you exceed this limit, charges are $0.30 or $0.50 per GB, depending on your plan. A free trial is also available. For detailed pricing information, visit the official pricing page.

Sentry Pricing

Sentry, on the other hand, uses a pricing model based on user seats and monthly rates with different tiers. Sentry also offers a 14-day free trial for exploring its features. For more detailed pricing information, do visit Sentry's official pricing page.

For those seeking a cost-effective solution, New Relic's free forever plan stands out.

When to Choose New Relic vs Sentry

When deciding between New Relic and Sentry, it’s important to choose based on what you need, as both tools offer unique strengths and weaknesses. consider these scenarios before choosing,

Choose New Relic if:

• You need in-depth performance monitoring across your entire infrastructure.
• You want detailed application performance metrics.
• You want AI-powered insights and automated anomaly detection.
• You require advanced integrations and a broad range of monitoring tools.

Choose Sentry if:

• Your primary goal is detailed error tracking and debugging.
• You need to visualize user interactions with session replays.
• You want a tool specifically designed for handling and diagnosing application errors.

An alternative to New Relic and Sentry: Atatus

Atatus is a full-stack observability and monitoring platform that provides comprehensive visibility into your application. It offers detailed insights into your logs, metrics, and traces, all in one place.

Here are a few reasons to consider Atatus as an alternative to New Relic vs Sentry:

• All-in-One Platform: Atatus offers a comprehensive platform that integrates all your monitoring needs in one place.
• APM (Application Performance Monitoring): Identify and fix spikes in endpoint failures and monitor application performance in real-time. Gain in-depth insights into transaction details, slow database queries, poor-performing network calls, and more.
• Advanced Error Tracking: Pinpoints backend errors to exact code locations, facilitating quick resolution.
• Log Management: Atatus provides a flexible log management solution with an out-of-the-box UI. Correlate logs with APM traces and errors for a comprehensive view.
• Built-in Alerting: The built-in alerting feature ensures you are promptly notified of any anomalies or performance issues.
• Custom Dashboards: Atatus provides a user-friendly interface for creating custom dashboards to display metrics, alerts, and other data, making it easy for organizations.
• Transparent Pricing: No hidden costs or special pricing for custom metrics.
• Free Trial: Explore features risk-free with a 14-day trial.

New to Atatus? Try it out with a 14-day free trial.