July 2018 Summaries

Dealer.com, a large automotive dealership website, relies on its site performance and availability to drive business for thousands of dealerships across the country. The site's performance is affected by dozens of discrete services, making it challenging to resolve performance issues and provide good customer experiences. To address this, Dealer.com uses New Relic distributed tracing, which provides end-to-end visibility into complex architectures, allowing teams to capture, visualize, and analyze traces through complex systems. Distributed tracing helps software teams understand the performance of every service, both upstream and downstream, enabling them to resolve performance issues, measure overall system health, and prioritize high-value areas for improvement. New Relic's distributed tracing provides actionable detailed visualizations for various language frameworks and supports common standards like OpenTelemetry and W3C, making it easier to identify insights in the data across the stack.

In a DevOps environment, managers provide guidance to a single team rather than managing siloed teams of developers and operations engineers. The goal is for the team to be frictionless and collaborate effectively with customer satisfaction as the driving factor. Jason Poole, senior software engineering manager at New Relic, shares his team's approach to achieving this goal, including having a T-shaped team composition, working in weekly sprints, and prioritizing reliability work alongside feature development. The team balances communication within themselves and with other teams, uses automation tools such as Grand Central and Container Fabric, and measures performance using New Relic Browser, APM, and Synthetics. By adopting a DevOps mindset, the team is able to deliver customer value more effectively and celebrate wins together.

DevOps can significantly enhance software development by fostering a collaborative environment between traditionally siloed roles, enabling teams to deliver software quickly and efficiently, as demonstrated by New Relic's Mobile APM team. Jason Poole, a senior software engineering manager at New Relic, emphasizes the importance of having a "T-shaped" team where members possess expertise in specific areas but are also capable of working across the entire stack to ensure productivity even during absences. The team operates in weekly sprints, balancing feature development and reliability work, while employing a proactive approach to incident prevention and management, including a unique "gut feel" method for deciding when to conduct postmortems. Communication within the team is streamlined by focusing on one minimum marketable feature (MMF) at a time, and collaboration is encouraged through practices like swarming and continuous improvement of processes. Automation tools such as Grand Central and Container Fabric support their DevOps operations, which include frequent deployments and rigorous monitoring of application performance using New Relic's own solutions. This DevOps model, characterized by shared goals and empowered decision-making, has been pivotal to New Relic's success and team health.

The New Relic team has been recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Application Performance Monitoring Suites, receiving a high rating of 4.6 out of 5 and an 83% recommendation rate based on customer feedback of 277 reviews. This distinction is a testament to the importance of customer satisfaction in vendor evaluation, with Gartner maintaining rigorous criteria to ensure fair recognition. The customers' testimonials highlight the value of New Relic in providing actionable insights and improving digital experiences, while also showcasing its ability to help businesses succeed despite other products failing. New Relic's commitment to customer feedback is demonstrated through its pride in this distinction and its dedication to using customer input to shape its products and services.

New Relic was recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Application Performance Monitoring Suites, receiving a 4.6 out of 5 rating from 277 reviews and achieving the highest recommendation rate at 83% as of July 25, 2018. This accolade is based on verified end-user feedback, requiring vendors to have at least 50 published reviews with an average rating of 4.2 stars or higher. Customers from various industries praised New Relic for its role in enhancing digital experiences and providing actionable insights. The New Relic team values customer feedback to continuously improve their services, emphasizing the importance of digital experience as a brand. They encourage more users to share their experiences on Gartner Peer Insights, highlighting the subjective nature of these customer-driven recognitions.

At New Relic, the company prioritizes transforming digital customer experiences through data-driven approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As a people leader, the Chief People Officer has made it a commitment to help team members thrive in a welcoming and supportive workplace culture. The team has made progress in increasing representation and retention of diverse talent, but acknowledges that there is still much work to be done to achieve significant change. The company's focus for the year ahead includes setting targets for senior executives to hold themselves accountable for DEI initiatives, implementing programs to balance bottom-up efforts with top-down support, and embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion into the business. With a strong commitment to creating an inclusive environment where all employees feel valued and heard, New Relic aims to drive positive change in the industry and beyond.

At New Relic, the focus on improving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is central to the company's mission of transforming digital customer experiences, with data playing a crucial role in these efforts. Chief People Officer Kristy Friedrichs outlines the company's commitment to fostering a welcoming workplace culture that values diverse perspectives and provides employees with resources for success. Over the past year, New Relic has seen slight improvements in gender and racial diversity, with women now comprising 30% of the workforce and 22% of technical roles, while people of color make up 32% of new hires. However, challenges remain, particularly in retention, as people of color have a lower retention rate compared to their white colleagues. Initiatives like a formal Allyship group and sponsorship programs have been introduced to support underrepresented groups, and the company is focusing on more substantial changes in the coming year. By setting accountability targets for leaders and enhancing employee engagement, New Relic aims to embed DEI into its business practices and drive positive change industry-wide, all while supporting employees' efforts to improve company culture.

In honor of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, New Relic's LGBTQ+ affinity group, Rainbow Relics, hosted special events in its global offices, including teams marching in pride parades. The company featured a speaker series with employees sharing personal stories on themes such as queer parenting, coming out experiences, attraction as a spectrum, LGBT activism in the Middle East and North Africa, and the "hidden" queer history of superhero comics. The events were well-received, with attendees showing support for the speakers who bravely shared their honest and vulnerable stories about facing challenges in their lives. Quotes from speakers highlighted the importance of acceptance, love, and understanding, emphasizing that every family is different and that people deserve respect and safety. New Relic values authenticity and inclusivity, making it a welcoming space for LGBTQ+ individuals, with the company committed to diversity, equality, and inclusion.

In celebration of LGBT Pride Month, New Relic's LGBTQ+ affinity group, Rainbow Relics, organized various events, including participation in pride parades and a speaker series featuring both New Relic employees and external speakers who shared personal stories and insights on topics such as queer parenting, coming out experiences, and LGBT activism in challenging regions. The events were well-attended, with speakers demonstrating courage and authenticity, aligning with New Relic's value of being "authentic" with each other. Notable presentations included discussions on the complexity of sexuality, the challenges of growing up gay, and the impact of superhero comics on understanding human diversity. These events highlighted the company's commitment to diversity and inclusion, while recognizing the ongoing need for greater LGBTQ+ visibility and representation.

The DevOps movement emphasizes collaboration and transparency across traditionally siloed organizations to deliver technical and business results. Collecting and analyzing real-time data is crucial for building a DevOps culture that leverages diverse teams to develop quality applications. New Relic provides best practices and tutorials to help organizations measure their DevOps success throughout three phases: Prepare, Activate, and Optimize. Each phase consists of multiple steps with its own measurement strategies, including app remediation, establishing objectives and baselines, setting proactive alerting, team dashboards, iterating and measuring impact, incident orchestration, resolving dependency risks, customer experience improvement, infrastructure resource sizing, and operations review. By following these phases and leveraging New Relic's tools, organizations can track their progress, be deliberate about every decision, and increase the odds of success in their DevOps journey.

The blog post discusses the importance of fostering collaboration and transparency in DevOps to achieve significant technical and business outcomes and how New Relic can aid in this transition through its "Guide to Measuring DevOps Success." This guide provides step-by-step tutorials for each stage of a DevOps journey—Prepare, Activate, and Optimize—detailing practices such as app remediation, setting objectives and baselines, proactive alerting, establishing team dashboards, iterating and measuring impact, incident orchestration, resolving dependency risks, improving customer experience, optimizing infrastructure resource sizing, and conducting operations reviews. Each phase involves specific strategies for measurement and improvement, with key performance indicators (KPIs) like application response time, error rate, and mean time to resolution being used to track progress and make informed decisions. The guide aims to help organizations track every step of their DevOps efforts, be intentional in decision-making, and enhance their overall success using New Relic's tools and services.