At that time New Relic still had some features that Datadog didn't but Datadog was rapidly catching up. We chose to unify the company's monitoring onto Datadog and it's a decision I'm still happy with today. Datadog rapidly caught up to then surpassed New Relic's functionality. Their support was better as well.
I kind of felt bad for New Relic, they were obviously pioneers in the space but at some point it seems like the business squandered the strong engineering talent they had recruited. It really felt like Datadog was making a cohesive platform and New Relic was building a set of disjointed products.
I hope that by taking the company private they can make the reforms needed to turn it around.
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Also only tangentially related but if you want a company to keep an eye on, Chronosphere (https://chronosphere.io/) has been the only vendor in the last 5 years to impress me with the stuff they're building. I get contacted about the observability space fairly frequently by both investors and startup founders looking to understand it better. Chronosphere's founders stood out in a sea of other people fighting for viability here. They really know their stuff and the product has been moving in an impressive direction. I'm not affiliated with them at all, just an observation from someone who tries to still keep an eye on the space.
The pioneer was a company called Wily Technology. Wily came quite big, and CA acquired them.
The founders of Wily took their fortune and separately created New Relic and AppDynamics based on Wily technology. CA sued both companies for patent violations. The lawsuit has since been settled.
I wouldn’t feel bad for them. In a way, New Relic should never have existed. The founder already had his pay day.
Just because they settled, doesn't mean the whole story is being told. There is nothing any of these companies have been doing that are massively novel.
