Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
New Relic
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
New Relic is a SaaS-based web and mobile application performance management provider for the cloud and the datacenter. They provide code-level diagnostics for dedicated infrastructures, the cloud, or hybrid environments and real time monitoring.
$0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatch
New Relic
Editions & Modules
Canaries
$0.0012
per canary run
Logs - Analyze (Logs Insights queries)
$0.005
per GB of data scanned
Over 1,000,000 Metrics
$0.02
per month
Contributor Insights - Matched Log Events
$0.02
per month per one million log events that match the rule
Logs - Store (Archival)
$0.03
per GB
Next 750,000 Metrics
$0.05
per month
Next 240,000 Metrics
$0.10
per month
Alarm - Standard Resolution (60 Sec)
$0.10
per month per alarm metric
First 10,000 Metrics
$0.30
per month
Alarm - High Resolution (10 Sec)
$0.30
per month per alarm metric
Alarm - Composite
$0.50
per month per alarm
Logs - Collect (Data Ingestion)
$0.50
per GB
Contributor Insights
$0.50
per month per rule
Events - Custom
$1.00
per million events
Events - Cross-account
$1.00
per million events
CloudWatch RUM
$1
per 100k events
Dashboard
$3.00
per month per dashboard
CloudWatch Evidently - Events
$5
per 1 million events
CloudWatch Evidently - Analysis Units
$7.50
per 1 million analysis units
Free (Forever)
$0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Telemetry Data Platform
$0.25
per month per extra GB data ingest (after first free 100GB per month)
Incident Intelligence
$0.50
per month per event (after first 1000 free events per month)
Standard
$99
per month per full user (after first free full user - unlimited free basic users)
Pro
Contact sales team
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatch
New Relic
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudWatch
New Relic
TrustRadius Insights
Amazon CloudWatch
New Relic
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
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.
If you use any AWS services, CloudWatch is the natural choice to monitor & troubleshoot your workload. Thankfully, for most AWS services, CloudWatch is either built-in or very easy to set up. However, being proficient in browsing & tracking the log events would take some training & practice. Having some experienced people on the team would help immensely, especially in spreading the skill to the rest of the team.
It is perfect for observing our energy platforms during high-load situations, such as grid demand spikes, or our real-time ingest of sensor data, allowing us to respond in real time to anomalies. And it’s a good way to monitor API performance in client dashboards, too. But it’s not as conducive for low-budget/low-code work or deep customization that doesn’t get ample development support given its complexity and expense.
It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.
Capturing Front end Metrics specially web vitals and setting up alerts for violations really helps.
NRQL is great tool to fetch the data you need. With queries you can pull the data and put the data by table or by chart. You can even trend graphs and create dashboards.
Synthetic Monitoring is very helpful for proactive monitoring. You can use it for user journeys by using scripted browser monitor type or just check availability using PING type.
ASk AI is great addition that can fetch details you need with natuaral language
Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.
I have not yet found any similar product that offers me this range of features to help us keep our online service fast and reliable. Besides this, New Relic is constantly evolving by adding new plugins to emerging technologies and platforms. Server performance measuring features are a key point as our user database grows.
Although the tool itself is easy to integrate and is readily available for use, it has its limitations. The key limitations of cloudwatch are with respect to cost incurred on log retention and log querying. While for key use cases this is sufficient, for more advanced use cases, Amazon CloudWatch doesn't work out. Also, obviously it is tightly coupled with AWS, which makes you look away if you need a single tool for all monitoring
New Relic helps in observability setup for the critical environments and getting known about the issues and troubleshoot the applications and services. Alerts helps in knowing the abnormal state of the system and services, Dashboards are used for visualizing the key metrics and muting the unwanted notifications and dropping the extra data from the source.
Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.
The support team has been really helpful and resolved most of the issues on time. However, for a couple of issues, several follow-ups were needed to elicit a reasonable response. The issue was deeply technical and could have been investigated only by their Architects, and bringing them into the ticket took longer than needed
The documentation was clear and concise; the only issue we ran into was custom application naming. Due to HTTPD mod_fcgid and the need for the application name to be set in php.ini (not in .htaccess or the virtual host directive) ... we had issues setting this up.
We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more prominent platforms for wider analysis, including Service desk support, SecOps, and ITOps monitoring within the organization.
Its covers all the observability aspects as well as giving us more competitive pricing models compared to other providers that's why I like to use New Relic in place of other tools. And also it introduces new Agentic AI features as well as it adopts AI in its RCA. As an observability tool it should reduce the RCA of any problem and New Relic is continuously focusing on that that's why I am preferring New Relic in place of other tools.
