November 2018 Summaries

New Relic has introduced a new feature called anomaly detection for distributed tracing, which automatically highlights unusually slow spans within a trace, making it easier to find and focus on sources of latency. This feature uses New Relic Applied Intelligence to compare the spans within a trace to similar traces and highlights anomalous spans with summaries and histogram charts showing their duration distribution. The new release also includes improvements such as condensed trace views, deployment markers, and trace groupings, which make it easier for DevOps teams to understand and troubleshoot microservices environments. These features provide faster root-cause identification, customizable dashboards, and targeted alerts, helping teams in complex environments where they often look at traces involving services they don't own deeply. The new release aims to build better observability for distributed systems by providing more intuitive experiences for customers working in microservices environments.

In response to the increasing complexity of microservices environments, New Relic has introduced a feature for anomaly detection within its distributed tracing capabilities, aimed at improving monitoring and troubleshooting for DevOps teams. This feature automatically identifies and highlights unusually slow spans in a trace by comparing them to similar traces, allowing teams to focus on latency sources more efficiently. New Relic's Applied Intelligence, which incorporates AI and machine learning, enhances this capability by uncovering actionable insights within extensive data sets. The new functionality includes improvements like trace groupings, deployment markers, and condensed trace views, facilitating faster root-cause identification and performance benchmarking. Additionally, users can create custom dashboards and alerts with New Relic Insights to monitor key services and system health. Early testing of these features has enabled teams to identify and address performance bottlenecks, enhancing the overall observability and performance of distributed systems.

The New Relic Cloud Adoption Solution for AWS is a comprehensive framework designed to manage complexity and provide visibility into every aspect of cloud migration from inception to implementation and operation. It combines people, processes, and technology to help customers plan, prioritize, track progress, and measure the benefits of their cloud adoption initiative. The solution aligns with AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) methodology, tools, services, and partners, providing a single pane of glass for monitoring and analysis across all three phases of MAP: Migration Readiness Assessment, Migration Readiness and Planning, and Migration and Operations. By integrating with AWS and ISV partners, the New Relic Cloud Adoption Solution offers crucial insights into each phase of cloud migration journey, helping customers achieve success in their cloud adoption initiatives.

New Relic introduces the Cloud Adoption Solution (CAS) for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to assist organizations in navigating the complexities of cloud migrations by providing a comprehensive framework that integrates people, processes, and technology. The CAS offers detailed insights into each phase of migration, from readiness assessment to ongoing operations, ensuring that businesses can monitor progress, measure impacts, and achieve their migration goals efficiently. By collaborating with AWS's Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and a network of software vendors and system integrators, New Relic CAS facilitates the creation of a unified approach to cloud adoption, offering pre-built dashboards and best practices to streamline the process. This solution not only provides real-time tracking and visibility into migration impacts but also aligns with AWS MAP's three-phase methodology to enhance decision-making and optimize cloud transformation strategies.

New Relic Browser is a powerful tool for understanding how your site's performance impacts your customers, providing capabilities to deliver great digital customer experiences. The guide offers tips and best practices for working with New Relic Browser, including setting up a naming convention for applications, linking APM and Browser apps for end-to-end visibility, using Session Traces to explore user behavior, diagnosing performance problems with AJAX requests, and creating URL whitelists to group browser metrics. It also provides guidance on using NRQL queries to get the most from Browser data, working with sourcemaps to decode minified JS errors, and accessing additional resources for learning more about New Relic Browser best practices.

New Relic Browser is a tool designed to enhance the understanding of how a website's performance impacts customer experiences, offering features that address issues ranging from AJAX performance to JavaScript errors in single-page applications. By providing guidance on key data resources and actionable performance insights, the tool helps users monitor, diagnose, and resolve performance issues efficiently. It recommends using naming conventions for organized application management and linking Browser with APM applications for comprehensive visibility into both frontend and backend performance metrics. New Relic Browser also features session traces and URL whitelists to provide context on user behavior and streamline data analysis, while NRQL queries and sourcemaps assist in uncovering and addressing JavaScript errors. The New Relic Community Team provides additional resources and support through the New Relic Explorers Hub, offering best practices and community-generated insights to optimize the use of New Relic Browser.

You can create a visual story about your team's work with New Relic Insights dashboards, which help identify areas that need attention before problems arise. Dashboards offer various ways to visualize data, including billboards, histograms, gauges, and more, allowing you to choose the best visualization for understanding what's happening in your systems. You can recreate the "All Chart Types" dashboard in your own environment using New Relic Query Language (NRQL) queries provided by New Relic. This dashboard includes various chart types that display different data visualizations, such as pageviews, unique sessions, and page-load durations. By sharing your custom dashboards on the Explorers Hub, you can win a New Relic branded Apple Watch or earn a New Relic Developer Program t-shirt and contest badge.

New Relic Insights dashboards offer a versatile way to visualize and monitor various aspects of team performance and system health through customizable visualizations using New Relic Query Language (NRQL). The All Chart Types dashboard exemplifies the platform's capabilities by showcasing numerous widget formats, such as billboards, histograms, and pie charts, to display data like page views, session counts, and page-load durations. Users can easily recreate this dashboard in their environment by utilizing provided NRQL queries and do not require any custom attributes. Additionally, New Relic encourages community engagement through a Shared Dashboards contest, where participants can share their dashboards for a chance to win prizes and gain recognition. This initiative aims to inspire users to create and share insightful visual stories about their data, leveraging the full potential of New Relic's platform.

The New Relic CLI tool is an open-sourced command line interface developed by IBM that allows users to manage New Relic resources, such as Synthetics monitors, Alerts policies and conditions, user accounts, and Insights dashboards. It provides features like creating, editing, and deleting resources, backing up and restoring configuration data, and automating tasks with CI/CD processes. The tool is designed to help teams increase their deployment speed and cadence by reducing the burden of managing boilerplate code. Users can use the CLI to manage these resources, create daily backups of Synthetics monitors, save New Relic settings to source-control tools, and configure retries and return codes for automation purposes.

The New Relic CLI tool, developed by IBM and open-sourced under the Apache License 2.0, is designed to streamline the management of New Relic resources by automating processes and reducing boilerplate code, thus supporting Agile and DevOps teams in enhancing their deployment speed and cadence. Available on GitHub, this command-line interface allows users to manage tasks such as creating, editing, and deleting New Relic Synthetics monitors, alerts, and dashboards, as well as backing up and restoring configurations. The tool is particularly useful for users looking to integrate New Relic tasks into their CI/CD workflows, as it supports proxy configurations, retries, and includes return codes for automation. It also facilitates sharing configurations across teams by saving settings to source-control tools like GitHub or BitBucket. Adilson Somensari, a senior solutions architect and the blog post's author, emphasizes that the CLI offers practical solutions for managing modern monitoring architectures, though these solutions are environment-specific and not part of New Relic's commercial offerings.

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that allows developers to run application code without managing servers. While it's often associated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the term "serverless" encompasses all cloud services that don't require manual server setup. AWS Lambda is a key feature of AWS, providing a functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platform where code runs only when triggered via API calls. The platform offers several benefits, including lightweight, hands-off serverless functions and high availability. However, it also comes with challenges, such as cold starts, concurrency limits, and deployment package limits. To get started with AWS Lambda, developers can use tools like New Relic's AWS Lambda integration to monitor their functions and optimize performance. The platform is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and developers should consider their specific needs and calculate the cost-effectiveness of serverless architecture for their applications.

Serverless computing, often associated with AWS Lambda, refers to cloud services that do not require manual server management, allowing developers to focus on code rather than infrastructure. AWS Lambda, a function as a service (FaaS) platform, automatically scales applications and ensures high availability, triggering code execution through API calls. While serverless functions simplify workflows and reduce administrative overhead, they still operate on underlying infrastructure managed by AWS, and considerations such as memory usage and cold starts—initial delays when a function is first invoked—are important. AWS Lambda functions can face limitations in memory, execution duration, and concurrency, which necessitate efficient design and resource allocation. Additionally, tools like New Relic's AWS Lambda monitoring integration and AWS Step Functions can enhance monitoring and orchestration, while the AWS serverless application model (SAM) and open-source tools like the Serverless Framework facilitate development and deployment. As serverless technology evolves, it is crucial to evaluate its applicability and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional architectures, especially in hybrid cloud environments where a mix of serverless and traditional services may be optimal.

New Relic Synthetics has introduced a feature called secure credentials to help users manage sensitive data in their scripts, making it easier to update passwords and other sensitive information across multiple scripts with minimal effort. The new feature utilizes key-value pairs and heavy encryption to keep user data safe and secure. With secure credentials, users can easily add and change sensitive data values without having to manually update each individual script. The feature is now available to all New Relic Synthetics users, providing a reduction in manual effort and an increase in security when managing sensitive data.

New Relic Synthetics has launched a feature called secure credentials, designed to streamline the management of sensitive data within synthetic scripts by allowing users to update credentials across multiple scripts simultaneously. This feature, developed in response to user feedback, uses heavily encrypted key-value pairs to safeguard data and simplify the process of updating sensitive information, such as passwords, without the need for manual script edits. Secure credentials also integrates with scripted browsers or API monitors and employs Amazon Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption, ensuring data is only decrypted at runtime and subsequently scrubbed from metrics to prevent persistent storage. The feature aims to reduce the labor associated with managing sensitive data while maintaining high security standards, offering users a more efficient and trustworthy way to simulate user flows and monitor site performance on a global scale.

New Relic has announced the opening of its East Coast HQ in Atlanta, Georgia, which has grown from a handful of team members to over 30 employees in just eight months, and is now expanding to accommodate further growth, with plans to double down on its presence in the region. The company's momentum continues with recent openings of new headquarters in Dublin, Ireland and Barcelona, Spain, as well as acquisitions and hiring key talent from Belgium-based monitoring company CoScale. New Relic counts over half of the Fortune 100 among its customers, including prominent companies like Cox Automotive, and is focused on delivering solutions to adopt DevOps, move to the cloud, and deliver a flawless digital customer experience. The company is now hiring for open positions in Atlanta and invites interested candidates to join its growing team, as it continues to build upon its momentum and expand its global presence.

In March 2018, New Relic announced the opening of its East Coast headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, which quickly grew from a small team to over 30 employees in eight months, prompting further expansion to accommodate up to 80 staff. The new Atlanta office, located in WeWork Colony Square, offers convenient access to public transportation and features modern amenities, such as large conference rooms and collaborative spaces, supporting New Relic's commitment to growth and innovation. This expansion is part of New Relic's broader strategy, which includes opening an EMEA headquarters in Dublin and acquiring Belgium-based CoScale, to enhance its global presence and meet the needs of its growing customer base, including over half of the Fortune 100. New Relic's advancements aim to support modern software teams in adopting DevOps, transitioning to the cloud, and delivering exceptional digital customer experiences, with continued recruitment efforts to bolster its Atlanta team.

New Relic Infrastructure offers a powerful set of solutions for infrastructure visibility challenges, allowing users to track host resource usage, monitor events, and correlate changes with potential impacts on performance. To get the most out of this added visibility, it's essential to create a naming convention, implement a tagging structure, and use filter sets to organize hosts and data. Additionally, using New Relic Insights queries, setting up alerts, and monitoring apps in one place can provide actionable data and enable faster issue resolution. By following these best practices, users can improve their application performance and gain valuable insights into their infrastructure.

New Relic Infrastructure is a comprehensive tool designed to enhance application performance by providing visibility into the underlying infrastructure, such as servers, networks, and storage resources. The platform offers solutions like host resource monitoring, event tracking, and inventory metrics to help organizations manage their infrastructure efficiently. Key practices for using New Relic Infrastructure include establishing consistent naming conventions and tagging structures for better organization, utilizing filter sets to focus on specific hosts, and leveraging New Relic Insights for data querying and analysis. The tool also integrates with various cloud and on-host services, offering over 50 integrations, including Amazon EC2, to streamline tasks like tagging. Additionally, New Relic Alerts can be configured for immediate notifications of infrastructure issues, while health maps provide a high-level overview of application and host health. The New Relic Community Team offers further resources and support through their Explorers Hub, encouraging users to expand their knowledge and capabilities with the platform.