August 2018 Summaries

The author of this blog post shares their views and solutions, but notes that they are environment-specific and may differ from New Relic's commercial offerings. The blog post is intended for discussion purposes only at the Explorers Hub, a separate community forum. Links to third-party sites are provided, but New Relic does not endorse or guarantee the content available on those sites.

竹澤 拡子, a Solution Consultant at New Relic with a background in IT service management, shares her insights on promoting work style reform and digital transformation across various industries. Since 2022, she has focused on the media industry, leveraging her expertise in IT operations management software. The blog emphasizes that her views are personal and not representative of New Relic, and any solutions she offers are tailored to specific environments, separate from New Relic's commercial offerings. Readers are encouraged to visit the Explorers Hub for further discussion and support, and it is noted that third-party links provided do not imply endorsement by New Relic.

The New Relic platform provides a wide variety of robust views, tools, and analytical insights to help customers better understand their software performance and business. To aid this understanding, New Relic University offers online webinars that cover various aspects of the platform, including getting started with specific products, configuration tips, and troubleshooting techniques. These webinars are designed to empower users to identify performance issues in their applications and perform root-cause analysis using tools such as transaction traces and error analytics. Additionally, New Relic University offers live interactive training webinars that focus on developer skills, operations management, and the fundamentals of New Relic Insights, a real-time analytics platform that collects and transforms data into actionable information about customers, applications, and business.

New Relic offers a comprehensive platform designed to enhance software and business performance through various views, tools, and analytical insights. To help users maximize the platform's potential, New Relic University (NRU) has developed a series of webinars covering topics from product initiation to advanced configuration techniques. These webinars include on-demand and live interactive sessions where participants can learn to troubleshoot, optimize, and monitor applications using New Relic's APM, Insights, and Infrastructure tools. The webinars aim to equip DevOps teams with the skills needed to analyze performance issues, use APIs, and manage application deployments efficiently. Additionally, NRU provides resources like live Q&A sessions and a dedicated forum for ongoing support and discussion.

Apache Kafka is a widely used distributed streaming platform that thousands of companies rely on to build scalable and high-throughput real-time streaming systems. To operate these systems effectively, it's essential to understand the architecture, key terms, and best practices for working with Kafka. The platform provides scalability, low latency, high throughput, fault-tolerance, flexibility, durability, and real-time data processing capabilities. However, as the system grows in scale, complexity can arise, making it challenging to manage data streams and messages. To address this, New Relic has compiled 20 best practices for operating scalable Kafka clusters, which are categorized into four main areas: working with topics, consumers, producers, and brokers. These best practices cover essential aspects such as partitioning, consumer lag, producer buffer sizes, broker memory, and monitoring, to ensure optimal performance and reliability in Kafka systems.

Apache Kafka is a powerful distributed streaming platform used by companies like New Relic, Uber, and Square to build scalable, high-throughput, real-time streaming systems. Despite its efficiency in simplifying data streams, Kafka can become complex at scale, particularly if consumers cannot keep up with data streams or if systems fail to scale with demand. The platform provides scalability, low latency, high throughput, fault tolerance, flexibility, and durability, making it ideal for real-time data processing applications. To address operational complexities, New Relic offers best practices for managing Kafka clusters, focusing on partitions, consumers, producers, and brokers. These practices include understanding data rates for retention, using random partitioning, upgrading consumer versions, configuring producer acknowledgments and retries, monitoring broker performance, and managing partition leadership and log compaction. The guidance emphasizes the importance of monitoring and adjusting configurations to maintain performance and reliability. For further learning, New Relic suggests resources such as Kafka documentation and Confluent's online talks, and offers a Kafka monitoring integration through its observability platform.