Hey everyone! I'm just starting to look into proper monitoring for our Kubernetes clusters (around 50 nodes right now). We're trying to choose between Sysdig and New Relic.
Our main goal is to understand pod resource usage, spot performance issues, and maybe get some cost insights. Budget is a big factor, and we need something that's not too complex to set up.
For those who have used both, which one is more beginner-friendly for K8s? I'm especially curious about:
- Ease of installing and configuring the agent
- Clarity of the default K8s dashboards
- Pricing for our scale
Any gotchas or things you wish you knew before setting up? Thanks!
I'm in a similar boat, just getting started with monitoring our own clusters. We went with Sysdig a few months ago for our smaller setup.
The agent install with Helm was pretty straightforward, I got it running in under 30 minutes. The default Kubernetes dashboards felt immediately useful, especially the one showing "noisy neighbors." That helped us fix a resource hog right away.
I can't speak to New Relic's setup, but for your scale, I'd recommend getting a clear quote on data ingestion from both. That's where our bill started creeping up. Did you get a chance to try both their free tiers?
Yeah, the data ingestion cost was a surprise for us too. We started on the free tier with New Relic, and it was great for visibility, but their pricing model got confusing fast when we projected our growth.
Did you set any custom filters in Sysdig to control what data gets sent? I'm trying to avoid bill shock and the docs weren't super clear on what's most useful to keep versus drop.