September 2018 Summaries

New Relic has announced support for Spring 5, a new web framework that provides non-blocking I/O and encourages a reactive coding style ideal for high-throughput services. New Relic APM monitors Spring 5 services by identifying incoming requests and tracking activity, allowing users to identify bottlenecks and service failures. The tool also tracks cross-thread activity of WebFlux routing and WebClient external calls, providing visibility into the entire distributed system. With this instrumentation, users can trace activity from their Spring 5 service to other services using different frameworks or languages, making it easier to monitor and optimize their microservices architecture.

The Spring Framework, a prominent tool for building web applications on the Java Virtual Machine, now enjoys enhanced support from New Relic APM with its latest version, Spring 5, which features the WebFlux framework for non-blocking I/O and a reactive coding style tailored for high-throughput services. New Relic APM's WebFlux instrumentation identifies transactions through route functions, monitors incoming requests, and tracks route handlers and methods to diagnose bottlenecks and service failures, whether using Spring WebFlux or Web MVC. It allows tracing of cross-thread activities and external WebClient calls while supporting custom asynchronous handling through New Relic's async API and @Trace annotation. This comprehensive monitoring extends to distributed tracing, offering visibility across diverse frameworks and languages, and is crucial for maintaining effective oversight in microservice architectures. Users can deploy Spring services via Spring Boot or app servers like Apache Tomcat and Eclipse Jetty, using either Java or Kotlin, and gain critical insights by installing the New Relic APM Java agent.

New Relic has partnered with Pivotal to develop comprehensive solutions for monitoring and optimizing Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) deployments at every stage of an enterprise's digital transformation. These solutions will be showcased at the SpringOne Platform conference in Washington, D.C., on September 24-27, 2018. The partnership combines New Relic's visibility, value, and velocity capabilities with Pivotal's platform for application modernization. New Relic provides end-to-end stack monitoring of PCF environments, including infrastructure, applications, microservices, and containers, while also offering a curated set of analytics that integrates the New Relic value methodology with Pivotal's value-stream analysis methodology. This enables customers to track progress in their transformation projects using prescriptive business dashboards and correlate business KPIs with application and PCF infrastructure data. The solutions are designed to accelerate new business services to market, reduce risk, and improve developer productivity, as seen in the story of West Corp., which adopted Pivotal and New Relic to drive its digital transformation.

New Relic has collaborated with Pivotal to enhance the deployment, monitoring, and optimization of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) in digital transformations. They showcased these solutions at the SpringOne Platform conference in 2018, providing workshops, networking events, and product demonstrations. New Relic's integration with PCF focuses on visibility, value, and velocity, offering end-to-end stack monitoring and correlating performance data with business metrics through their Insights platform. The partnership enables businesses to track their transformation progress and optimize application performance across various phases, contributing to agile development and effective DevOps practices. A case study with West Corp highlights how New Relic and PCF facilitated West's migration to a cloud-based, microservices model, improving application delivery and reducing deployment risks.

New Relic has introduced several new intelligence features to help development and operations teams speed up development, optimize performance, and troubleshoot problems in complex software environments. These features include outlier detection for NRQL conditions in New Relic Alerts, incident context in New Relic Alerts, improved preview charts, a new NRQL condition UI, and support for the FACET keyword in NRQL condition queries. Outlier detection automatically detects when members of a group deviate from the norm, while incident context provides intelligent suggestions on where to start an incident investigation, speeding resolution. These features are designed to help IT teams notify themselves of problems with their modern systems and resolve them quickly and efficiently.

As modern IT environments grow more complex, New Relic has introduced several new intelligence features to assist development and operations teams in optimizing performance and troubleshooting issues. These innovations include outlier detection for New Relic Query Language (NRQL) conditions, which automatically identifies deviations within groups, aiding in the detection of misconfigurations or misbehaving components. The incident context feature enhances troubleshooting by providing intelligent suggestions for incident investigations, helping to quickly identify performance anomalies and reduce downtime. Additionally, improvements to alerting tools, such as preview charts and an updated NRQL condition UI, facilitate better threshold setting and system monitoring. These features are designed to help manage complex, distributed systems more efficiently by leveraging New Relic's data platform to deliver advanced intelligence capabilities.

New Relic helps cloud migration by identifying application dependencies quickly and efficiently through five key steps: identifying applications and components, installing New Relic agents, mapping and assessing dependencies, spotting unknown dependencies, and performing an infrastructure inventory. By using these steps, users can reduce the risk of missed interdependencies causing outages or complications during a cloud migration project. The process involves collecting data on application availability and external services, creating visual summaries of application dependencies, and identifying connections between applications and external services. New Relic's Service Maps feature provides a starting point to plan a cloud migration by defining upstream and downstream dependencies, while the infrastructure inventory helps identify software packages installed on servers and their configuration data. By leveraging these tools and insights, users can make better decisions about cloud infrastructure and migrate more quickly with confidence.

Cloud migration involves critical steps such as identifying application dependencies and conducting infrastructure configuration to prevent complications or outages. New Relic offers tools to streamline this process by helping users swiftly identify application dependencies and perform infrastructure inventories. The guide outlines five key steps: identifying applications and their components, installing New Relic agents, mapping and assessing dependencies using Service Maps, spotting unknown dependencies, and performing a detailed infrastructure inventory. These steps, along with New Relic’s capabilities to provide real-time updates and insights into software packages and configurations, enable teams to plan and prioritize their cloud migration confidently. The blog post, authored by Rose Randall, emphasizes the importance of understanding application ecosystems for successful cloud migration and offers resources for further exploration of New Relic's solutions.