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New Relic vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

New Relic
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (6th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (4th), AIOps (3rd)
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
41st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of New Relic is 6.3%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.4%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Iqbal Khowaja - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a simple user interface and end-to-end monitoring and self-healing features
My organization uses many application performance management solutions, such as AppDynamics, New Relic APM, Splunk, and Datadog. I'm the CTO for the state of Hawaii, and across the board, different departments use different APM tools. I'm using the latest version of New Relic APM, but I cannot recall the exact version. My company has a dozen engineers using and monitoring New Relic APM. I'd tell anyone planning to use New Relic APM that it has to fit what you have. For example, most of my company's payload is in AWS, and the tool has adopters and features that CloudWatch cannot provide. Still, New Relic APM can, so you should do a demo or trial run first and see if it's a tool that'll help you with end-to-end monitoring. New Relic APM is working well for my company, so an excellent way to start is to do a trial run to see how the tool works out for your current applications. My rating for the tool is nine out of ten because my experience with it has been great. New Relic also worked closely with my company and has always been upfront on what's available and what's not. My company is a New Relic APM customer.
VinayKumar16 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting
The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"New Relic has helped us in terms of the optimizing our print and loading times."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"Working with the solution is very easy. It's user-friendly."
"One valuable feature is that the synthetic alert stays open until the issue is resolved. You can actually monitor whether your system is back up."
"The solution offers good documentation."
"New features are added often."
"The most valuable features are the dashboards and tracing."
"What I like best about New Relic APM is its user interface because it's simple. The most valuable feature of New Relic APM is end-to-end monitoring."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The UI is very intuitive."
 

Cons

"The solution should include more detailed reports for SQL database requests."
"I think that there have been some questionable product enhancements. Over a year ago, New Relic rolled out a new navigation that really disrupted our workflow."
"One thing I'd like to see in any APM, especially New Relic, is the ability to use distributed transactions. When one microservice calls another, it calls another database and microservice. The entire data visualization layer will not be able to correlate from one microservice from end to end and return on that path. Distributed transactions would be a great addition that would make life simpler. Unfortunately, no APM has that end-to-end capability."
"There are times when you restart the engines and the servers have a unique ID for the host and you need to remove the server. It is difficult because some are on-premise and others are production hosts. Having downtime is not very good when updating. However, it is not a constant issue."
"The solution needs to have staging."
"The deployment process could be improved."
"Some AIOps are missing in New Relic APS, and I would like to see more features in this area."
"The solution does not provide input on how the page performs in a big group. It just says that the page performance is bad, but it does not say what can be done to improve it. If they could provide some insight or guidance on how to make improvements, that would be a big help."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a picture which goes to your browser and it monitors requests from other users. However, it's impossible to use now because the price is very high. The feature is very nice, but I tried it during the trial period, and the current price makes it impossible to use."
"The price of New Relic could improve. It is expensive."
"If I remember it correctly, the pricing was based on the core, and the monthly subscription used to cost us $1,500 or $2,000. We had pre-prod and production services. Costing was different for pre-prod and production. For pre-prod, it was 40% less than the production service cost. It was a combined package."
"The price was one of the reasons we chose this solution."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was easy. The product is easy to deploy and manage, which is why our company purchased through the AWS Marketplace."
"Because of budget, we are not using the mobile app part of this tool."
"The pricing and licensing are good if you have an account manager and a partner manager who are looking to help out."
"If it’s the right tool, it doesn’t matter what it costs because you’re going to get it back many-fold from your productivity."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
43%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What do you like most about New Relic Insights?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?
Email alert customization is limited; it cannot be tailored much, which makes the system more rigid than optimal. The handling of logs from integration tools is not as advanced compared to other to...
What needs improvement with LightStep?
There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...
 

Also Known As

New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

World Fuel Services, Verizon, FootLocker, McDonald's, Trainline, Mondia Media, Confused, Costa Coffee, Ryanair, Marks & Spencer, William Hill, Delivery Hero, Skyscanner, BASF, DAZN, Veygo, Virtuo, movingimage, talabat, Australia Post, Tokopedia, Seven Network, Virgin Australia, Zomato, BigBasket, Mercado Libre, Lending Club
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about New Relic vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.