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Splunk vs. New Relic

When there's a performance problem, time and context matter. New Relic's slowed alerting, disconnected troubleshooting workflows, and inflexible log analytics lead to missed issues and guesswork. Only Splunk offers real-time speed, guided troubleshooting, and enterprise scale to get you to accurate root causes faster, with less toil.

splunk vs new relic
slow detection

New Relic

Slow Detection

With Kubernetes containers scaling up or down in seconds, New Relic’s slow batch telemetry collection makes it difficult to see intermittent problems and respond quickly.

Splunk's Advantage

Splunk Observability Cloud is built for ephemeral applications with <10-second collection and visualization. Get insights into events in containerized applications as they happen to speed up MTTR, protect your reputation, and keep your users happy. 

inflexible data storage

New Relic

Inflexible Data Storage

Complete visibility is key to troubleshooting complex applications with geographically disparate tiers, deployed SaaS and on-prem. New Relic’s database was built for time series data and updated for logs. It lacks support for the range and cardinality of data sources necessary to solve complex enterprise challenges.

Splunk's Advantage

Splunk ingests, stores, and searches any human-readable file. We enrich datasets with business context enabling any enterprise team to visualize, correlate, and resolve issues. We visualize and correlate telemetry to real-world events, predicting and preventing problems originating anywhere without quantity or source limits. 

incomplete opentelemetry solution

New Relic

Incomplete OpenTelemetry Solution

New Relic cannot visualize data derived from its proprietary agent and OTel collectors in the same graph. This forces users to default to the New Relic proprietary agent and continue their struggle with vendor lock-in.

Splunk's Advantage

Splunk has a complete, native OpenTelemetry implementation. Collect, process, transform, visualize, and export OpenTelemetry data without concurrent agents or manual manipulation. We support data collection in any format and are pushing the industry forward with OpenTelemetry improving data portability, lowering switching costs, and ensuring universal access to telemetry for our customers.

With a more agile approach and real-time observability from Splunk, the Rappi IT team now efficiently manages more than 1,000 microservices, 6,000 hosts and 15,000 containers — all while slashing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by over 90%

Alejandro Comisario, Executive Vice President of Engineering, Rappi
Read the Customer Story

Splunk vs New Relic

  Splunk New Relic
Log Analytics

Our metrics and full fidelity traces correlate well with logs, so users can find and resolve issues quickly. Proven indexing and search scale across enterprise datasets lets you fast-track finding what you need when you need it. 

Minimal log file correlation and reports of slow, inefficient searches make querying or troubleshooting log data challenging. New Relic does not ingest all log file types or use related content for log file analytics. Without automatic field tagging in unstructured data, log usability is limited without manual designation.  

Detection & Alerting

Splunk's real-time streaming architecture collects data in one-second intervals and reports in <10 seconds. This enables you to visualize, analyze, and alert on changes in seconds, so you can spot and fix problems faster in cloud-native applications and infrastructure.

New Relic agents can collect granular data.  They use batch processing to poll telemetry data, typically reporting in one-minute intervals leading to slower detection and alerting for any issues. 

Data Retention & Integration

Splunk captures, visualizes, and analyzes every time-series metric, trace, log, and event down to the line of code so you don’t miss any critical signals. Plus, Metrics Pipeline Management lets you control metrics volume at the point of ingestion to optimize observability spend.

New Relic tracing can collect 100% of trace data from web browsers and mobile apps, but they sample backend traces. This leads to disconnected and duplicated spans, which can slow troubleshooting, increase costs and make it harder to isolate problems.

Troubleshooting Experience

Cohesive and comprehensive troubleshooting workflows in Splunk Observability Cloud allow engineers to start from a user, service, application or infrastructure layer, identify what’s affected and isolate what’s broken quickly and easily. Using Splunk IT Service Intelligence, ITOps teams can quickly connect IT service health  with business impact to track lost revenue, identify which users require triage, and facilitate enterprise-wide communication.

Disconnected and isolated products and capabilities make it hard for users to know where to begin. Users have redundant, disconnected experiences navigating from product to product, particularly with New Relic Explorer, Lookout, Navigator, Time Warp and Workloads, due to overlapping functionality and built-in APM and Infrastructure Monitoring dashboards.

OpenTelemetry Support

Splunk uses an OpenTelemetry collector as our native telemetry collection mechanism and is a significant contributor to the project. Users can confidently collect, process, transform, visualize and alert on OpenTelemetry data without worrying about exceptions and OpenTelemetry-specific constraints. They can directly contribute to the community and fully realize the business value of OpenTelemetry for their enterprise.

While New Relic is associated with Cloud Native Computing Foundation, (CNCF) and does have OpenTelemetry agents, it doesn’t allow users to visualize or export data easily, reducing the likelihood that customers realize the full OpenTelemetry business benefits.

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