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Free-Limited
Tool Comparison
Grafana
The open-source platform for beautiful, actionable monitoring dashboards.
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At a Glance
| Attribute | Grafana | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| License / Pricing | Free-Limited | Free-Limited |
| Type | DevOps | DevOps |
| GitHub Stars | — | — |
| Rating | 4.6/5 | 4.4/5 |
| Key Features | 6 listed | 6 listed |
| Integrations | 5 listed | 5 listed |
| Categories | MonitoringObservability | ObservabilityMonitoring |
Key Features
Grafana
- 50+ native data source connectors: Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB, and more
- Rich panel library: graphs, heatmaps, tables, gauges, and stat panels
- Dashboard-as-code with JSON and Grafonnet for version control
- Unified alerting across all connected data sources
- Grafana Loki for cost-effective log aggregation
- Grafana Tempo for distributed tracing alongside metrics
New Relic
- APM with distributed tracing for 15+ languages
- Unified telemetry: metrics, logs, events, and traces in one query interface
- NRQL — New Relic Query Language for flexible data exploration
- Synthetics for proactive endpoint monitoring from 20+ global locations
- Error inbox for tracking and triaging application errors
- AIOps: intelligent alert correlation to reduce notification noise
Real-World Use Cases
Grafana
Full-stack observability for a microservice
Connect Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for traces
Infrastructure capacity planning
Pull node and pod CPU and memory metrics from Prometheus
New Relic
Root cause analysis for a production incident
Alert fires on a spike in error rate detected by New Relic APM
Kubernetes cluster observability
Deploy the New Relic infrastructure agent as a DaemonSet
Integrations
Grafana
prometheuselastic-observabilitydatadognewrelickubernetes
New Relic
kubernetesprometheusgrafanaelastic-observabilityansible
🏆 Which should you choose?
Choose Grafana if…
- → you're already in the Monitoring ecosystem and prefer Grafana's workflow
Choose New Relic if…
- → you're already in the Observability ecosystem and prefer New Relic's workflow