March 2016 Summaries

The value of video in engaging audiences and measuring its quality is significant, with 70% of people viewing brands more positively after watching interesting video content from them. However, media delays can lead to viewer abandonment and decreased engagement. New Relic provides tools to monitor video player performance, offer Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, and track user experience across various devices and environments. By leveraging its Software Analytics Cloud, users can gain insights into their video libraries, track attributes from device media players, and prioritize improvements to enhance the viewing experience. This is a critical time for media content owners and producers, with new technologies making capturing, editing, and distributing media content easier, but also increasing consumer expectations of video quality and viewing experience.

Video content is becoming increasingly significant, with predictions that it will comprise over 80% of consumer internet traffic, necessitating improved performance monitoring to meet rising viewer expectations. The blog discusses how New Relic's tools, including APM, Browser, and Mobile, offer comprehensive monitoring and analytics capabilities to ensure seamless video playback across various devices and environments. These tools enable media providers to gather data on device type, geographic location, and ISP, helping to address issues like buffering, which can lead to viewer abandonment. The New Relic Software Analytics Cloud provides flexibility in monitoring video performance by capturing real-time data from users' devices, facilitating the identification of quality of service issues. As technology advances, now is an opportune moment for content owners to leverage these insights for enhancing the user experience, with New Relic offering customizable solutions to suit different environments.

New Relic Insights has released new functionality called SINCE, which allows users to ask questions about their data relative to rolling time windows, providing more relevant information than previous methods. This new query syntax for NRQL (Insights' query language) enables users to ask questions such as "What was our backend response time like during our peak load hours today?" or "How did our error rate change on Transactions during our maintenance window on Sunday?" The SINCE functionality also includes pre-set time ranges and "helper" keywords that can be used to further customize results, making it easier for users to get the information they need. Additionally, a new stddev() function has been added, which returns a single standard deviation for a given attribute in Insights, providing insights into variation in load times or other metrics.

As a customer asked about using New Relic Insights to analyze Alerts data, it turned out that this is possible and can be set up with ease. To get started, you need an Insert Key for the Insights API, your New Relic account ID, and create a Webhook notification channel in Alerts. You customize the JSON payload by adding an eventType field and specify the custom Insights event name. The new Webhook channel will post incident details to Insights whenever a condition is violated on an alert policy, allowing you to analyze and slice the data as needed.

New Relic has introduced a new "SINCE" functionality to its Insights platform, allowing users to query data based on specific time ranges, such as "SINCE today" or "SINCE this week," and exclude particular periods like maintenance windows. This enhancement in NRQL, Insights' query language, enables more precise queries, such as examining backend response times during peak hours or changes in error rates during maintenance. Additionally, a standard deviation function (stddev()) has been added to help identify anomalies in data patterns, exemplified by its use in detecting spikes in transaction errors. These updates aim to broaden the scope of questions users can ask about their applications, providing more tailored insights into their business operations.

New Relic Insights allows users to analyze Alerts data by setting up a dashboard to display the number of incidents per alert policy and the conditions triggering each incident. To achieve this, users need an Insert Key for the Insights API and their New Relic account ID. Once this information is gathered, a Webhook notification channel is created in Alerts, where users customize the JSON payload to include an event type and associate the channel with alert policies. This setup enables Alerts to send incident details to Insights for further analysis. The blog post, authored by Phil Weber, a Senior Technical Training Specialist at New Relic University, highlights that the solutions provided are specific to certain environments and do not represent New Relic's commercial offerings.