January 2018 Summaries

New Relic APM is designed to help modern application teams exploit the latest technology trends to confidently move faster—reducing costly downtime, improving engineer productivity, and enabling high-performing applications. The tool delivers on this promise through 10 core capabilities that make it the choice for building better software, including easy-to-set-up real-time instrumentation and analytics, flexible instrumentation and dashboarding, and guides appropriate engineer responses. It also correlates application performance to end-user experience, connects application and infrastructure performance, provides rich, detailed transaction data, and offers real-time error analysis with on-demand diagnostic tools. Additionally, it integrates with DevOps tooling, cloud-service instrumentation, and is built to scale. These capabilities are essential for modern application teams struggling to adapt to today's software development trends and challenges.

New Relic APM is a robust application performance management tool designed to help modern application teams leverage technology trends to enhance productivity, reduce downtime, and boost application performance. It offers ten core capabilities, including real-time instrumentation and analytics, flexible data collection, guided engineer responses through artificial intelligence, and correlation of application performance with end-user experience. The platform connects application and infrastructure performance, provides detailed transaction data, and offers real-time error analysis with deep diagnostic tools. Seamlessly integrating with DevOps tools and major cloud services, New Relic supports scalable monitoring solutions without the need for additional hardware or complex configurations. These features make it a preferred choice for application teams adapting to contemporary software development challenges.

New Relic has announced the general availability of its integration with StatsD, a lightweight Node.js application that collects and analyzes application metrics. The integration allows New Relic Infrastructure Pro subscribers to monitor metrics sent to StatsD from their applications, providing a flexible rule system for sending and categorizing large volumes of metric data. With this integration, users can visualize their metrics using the New Relic Query Language (NRQL) and track, trend, manage, and alert on their metrics in real-time. The integration is available now in the New Relic UI, and StatsD metrics are stored in New Relic Infrastructure as samples, which can be used to gain insights into application performance and infrastructure health.

New Relic has announced the general availability of its integration with StatsD, a popular tool for collecting and analyzing application metrics, now accessible to New Relic Infrastructure Pro subscribers. This integration allows users to monitor metrics sent to StatsD from New Relic Insights, utilizing a flexible rule system to categorize and visualize data using New Relic Query Language (NRQL). StatsD, initially developed by Etsy, aggregates application metrics and can now send this data to New Relic Infrastructure, enabling users to track, trend, manage, and alert on these metrics effectively. The blog illustrates how to set up and test this integration on a Linux-based server, emphasizing the potential of tracking a wide range of metrics. This integration exemplifies New Relic's commitment to expanding its monitoring capabilities, with additional integrations like Redis and Apache available, inviting users to explore and manage their metrics through this enhanced platform.

The US government is shifting its IT systems to the cloud and modernizing them using DevOps culture and agile teams that leverage cloud computing and new software. However, this transformation faces similar obstacles as private-sector enterprise organizations, including poor insights into their systems, limited adaptability to change, and bad team alignment. To overcome these challenges, government IT departments need to pivot their departments into agile teams that follow a DevOps approach and use modern tools like New Relic to improve visibility, reduce costs, and speed up innovation. With the right tools, government agencies can deliver better user experiences at reduced cost while gaining deeper visibility into software and systems and being more accountable around risk, compliance, and budgets.

As the U.S. government transitions to cloud-based IT systems, it faces challenges similar to those encountered by the private sector, including outdated systems, limited adaptability, and insufficient team alignment. The adoption of agile methodologies and DevOps practices, along with leveraging cloud computing platforms like AWS and Azure, is crucial for modernizing government IT departments. These changes facilitate scalable technology solutions that free up resources and allow for tackling more strategic initiatives, as demonstrated by the successful transformation of agencies such as Medicare and Veterans Affairs. The push for modernization is driven by the need to replace legacy systems and improve security, which can be compromised by unmonitored infrastructures. Tools like New Relic offer enhanced visibility and real-time insights, aiding in risk management and compliance with security standards like FISMA and FedRAMP. Despite budget constraints, these advancements have enabled government agencies to deliver improved user experiences and operate more efficiently. As New Relic approaches FedRAMP Authorization to Operate (ATO), it aims to further assist government IT teams in enhancing their systems' performance and innovation capabilities.

The New Relic Insights Dashboard API is a REST API designed to provide programmatic control over dashboards in sub-accounts and across an organization, enabling unique solutions and automation of dashboard management. The API offers five endpoints for creating, listing, showing, updating, and deleting dashboards, as well as additional functionality like filtering and pagination. To use the API, customers must generate a user-level admin API key and navigate to the different endpoint using the New Relic API Explorer. The Insights Dashboard API can be valuable in various use cases, such as reinforcing monitoring culture, creating shared knowledge, eliminating "what should I monitor" questions, leveraging automation to increase efficiency, and supporting a consistent monitoring process across teams and departments.

New Relic has introduced the Insights Dashboard API, a REST API that provides programmatic control over dashboards within organizations, facilitating faster and more efficient management. By offering endpoints for creating, listing, showing, updating, and deleting dashboards, the API allows users to configure dashboard and widget data in a JSON format, enhancing customization options such as visibility and editing permissions. This tool is particularly valuable for fostering a consistent monitoring culture across teams, creating shared knowledge through dashboard templates, and streamlining the onboarding process for new applications or services. The API reduces manual maintenance, enhances automation, and supports a self-service model for leveraging dashboards organization-wide. Users can get started by generating an API key and utilizing the New Relic API Explorer, with further information available in the documentation.