May 2019 Summaries

With modern digital business requiring observability at all times, New Relic's free mobile apps enable users to monitor app performance anytime and anywhere with real-time and historical data viewable through key transaction data and app errors, as well as push notifications for incoming issues. The Insights mobile app allows access to custom instrumented dashboards with history and favorites functionality, while new updates include language agent monitoring for Ruby VM, JVM, Elixir, Node.js, and Go applications, and sharing features that enable users to investigate, understand, and share critical information with their teams without needing a computer. These features provide easy access to performance data, diagnose issues quickly, and share results with the team, all from mobile devices, allowing users to take their data on-the-go.

New Relic offers two mobile apps, the New Relic mobile app and the New Relic Insights mobile app, available for iOS and Android devices, enabling users to monitor application performance anytime and anywhere. These apps provide real-time and historical performance tracking, key transaction data, and error notifications through push alerts. Recent updates have introduced new language agents and sharing features, allowing users to monitor applications built on Ruby VM, JVM, Elixir, Node.js, and Go, and share custom dashboards with team members directly from their mobile devices. The apps facilitate on-the-go performance issue diagnosis and team communication, enhancing the flexibility and accessibility of New Relic's monitoring capabilities.

You can automate common workflows in New Relic using its APIs to increase efficiency and reduce manual effort. This can be achieved by labeling applications based on their names, setting Apdex thresholds for response time percentiles, and automating these tasks using Node.js scripts that interact with the New Relic API. The APIs allow developers to easily integrate automation into their workflows, making it easier to manage and analyze large numbers of services or application instances. By leveraging API automation, users can streamline processes, reduce laborious manual work, and get more done with less effort.

New Relic APIs are designed to simplify workflow automation, allowing users to efficiently manage tasks such as labeling applications and setting Apdex thresholds. The blog post illustrates how to automate these processes using Node.js scripts, demonstrating how to apply labels to applications based on their names and adjust Apdex settings according to response time percentiles. This automation minimizes manual labor and enhances the manageability of applications, especially in complex systems with numerous service instances. The post encourages users to explore further and share their experiences on the New Relic Explorers Hub, offering additional resources for learning about New Relic's capabilities. While the views expressed are those of the author, they provide valuable insights into leveraging New Relic’s APIs for effective application management.

This year's survey at the New Relic Product Offsite asked attendees to name their favorite software development tools, with a focus on those that have the biggest positive impact on their day-to-day work. The results showed IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio Code as clear favorites among respondents, with comments highlighting their powerful features, ease of use, and ability to integrate well with other tools. Other tools mentioned by respondents included Bash, Keyboard Maestro, Trello, Sketch, curl, Sublime Text, and even pen and paper, which were valued for their simplicity, customizability, and lack of dependence on services or batteries. The survey's small sample size was acknowledged, but the insights gained provided a useful snapshot of the tools used by New Relic product teams.

At the annual New Relic Product Offsite in Sunriver, Oregon, the New Relic blog team conducted an informal survey to identify attendees' favorite software development tools, yielding 28 responses from over 700 attendees. The survey, part of a lively "poster session" event, revealed IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio Code as the top choices among a diverse group of software engineers, managers, and other roles. Participants praised IntelliJ for its powerful capabilities across multiple languages, especially Java, while Visual Studio Code was lauded for its speed, customization options, and built-in terminal and debugging features. Other tools, such as Bash, Keyboard Maestro, Trello, Sketch, curl, Sublime Text, and even pen and paper, were highlighted for their specific functionalities and the unique benefits they brought to different roles within the company. The survey provided insights into the preferences and rationales behind tool choices, while also capturing some unconventional responses like "sleep" and "a table saw," reflecting the creative nature of the engineering community.

The New Relic 2019 Product Offsite was a three-day event in Sunriver, Ore., where over 700 attendees from more than 50 product teams gathered to discuss the company's new observability platform, New Relic One. The introduction of New Relic One marked a transformational year for the company, with a focus on modernizing its platform and delivering incremental improvements. Understanding customer needs was also a key focus, with sessions emphasizing empathy and practical advice on how to incorporate that wisdom into product decisions. The event featured top New Relic execs and hands-on practitioners, with topics ranging from observability capacities to lightweight, modular agents. The Product Offsite is not just an annual event but also a testament to the company's engineering culture, with a year-long payoff in aligning the team for success.

New Relic's 2019 Product Offsite, held in Sunriver, Oregon, was a dynamic event focused on the launch of New Relic One, the industry's first entity-centric observability platform. Attended by over 700 participants from global offices, the event emphasized the company's mission to enhance software development and internet quality through customer-focused innovation. Key sessions included presentations on customer empathy, product strategy, and the integration of customer feedback into product development. The offsite featured a blend of educational and social activities, fostering connections among team members and reinforcing New Relic's engineering culture. The event's success was attributed to meticulous planning and the dedication of a team that curated high-quality content, with a goal to align and inspire the team for the coming year.

AWS Lambda is an event-based serverless computing platform that allows modern software engineers to build and modify single-purpose functions without worrying about underlying compute resources. However, teams have been calling for a robust monitoring solution to help with faster troubleshooting and alerting, managing application scale, and controlling complex environments. New Relic has announced the availability of its monitoring solution for AWS Lambda in the New Relic One platform, which provides key data about each individual function, including aggregate performance data and individual invocation data. The solution includes automatic framework instrumentation designed specifically to run in the AWS Lambda environment, as well as new data collection tooling built to gather function data with negligible overhead. With this solution, users can monitor functions from a Summary or Metrics page, troubleshoot using the Distributing tracing page, or explore errors and invocations pages. The solution also provides important metadata and tags so that users can query the collected data, with data stored in New Relic's database as events. To get started, users need to configure their AWS account, instrument their AWS Lambda code, and stream CloudWatch logs to the New Relic log-ingestion function. Once everything is configured correctly, users should see data reporting in the AWS Lambda monitoring UI in New Relic One.

New Relic One—the next evolution of the New Relic platform—is designed to give you a unified view into data and how it all connects, providing both strategic and pragmatic observability for enterprise-scale challenges. It enables leaders to see across organizational boundaries while maintaining secure data access, and engineers to troubleshoot with confidence using distributed traces, enterprise-wide maps, and custom views and dashboards that visualize the information they care about most. New Relic One takes an entity-centric point of view, allowing users to see across all entity interdependencies and cut through complexity by identifying and indexing entities as it ingests data, tracking their complex relationships to each other. It provides features such as global search, entity explorer, tag APIs, and relationship API to give users fast access to the information and context they need, no matter where it comes from, and enables them to build software faster and deploy more frequently using the context delivered by New Relic One.

New Relic has announced new capabilities that make it easier for teams to quickly explore data and create dashboards that achieve their goals while meeting unique needs. The company's new chart builder, available in New Relic One, the industry's first entity-centric observability platform, offers a self-service data-visualization tool and dashboard experience. This update aims to address three key questions: accessibility and usability, impactful data visualizations, and simplification and acceleration of data visualization creation. The new capabilities include a point-and-click query tool, hover-over definitions for NRQL data types, advanced filtering tools, improved dashboards with clearer visuals, and enhanced integration options. These features empower customers to explore their data in real-time, create custom charts quickly, and connect the dots across different aspects of performance issues or business questions. The new chart builder and dashboard experience are designed to make it easier for users to extract insights from ever-increasing amounts of data and communicate those insights in ways that support timely and effective decision-making.

New Relic's new global search experience for distributed tracing allows customers to easily find traces by using custom attributes that teams often add to spans within a particular service, eliminating the limitations of existing trace search tools and making it easier to tap into this value. This feature enables users to search for traces with specific span attributes without resorting to manual propagation or knowing where attributes originated or with which services they are associated. With global trace search, customers can now find all traces in the system based on customerID attribute, version numbers, error messages, user/customer information, or any other custom attribute, regardless of where in the trace those attributes were added. This feature improves the ability to find traces quickly, easily, and with greater precision, allowing teams to work faster and more efficiently to solve performance issues in distributed software environments.

New Relic One is an advanced evolution of the New Relic platform designed to address the complexities of modern software systems by providing comprehensive observability across dynamic technology stacks. It empowers software engineers and leaders with tools to visualize and understand interdependent systems through features like global search, entity explorer, and tag APIs. These capabilities enable users to troubleshoot efficiently by offering insights into the relationships and dependencies of various entities, such as applications, services, and cloud environments. By offering customizable dashboards and utilizing distributed tracing, New Relic One allows for deep diagnostics and root cause analysis, ensuring that enterprises can create and maintain high-quality digital experiences. The platform's entity-centric approach helps in managing the intricate web of dependencies, promoting seamless collaboration across teams and enhancing strategic visibility while maintaining secure data access.

New Relic has introduced a new global trace search feature within its distributed tracing functionality, significantly enhancing the capability for software teams to identify and address performance issues in distributed systems. This innovation allows users to search for traces using custom attributes across multiple services without manual propagation, overcoming limitations of previous trace search tools that restricted searches to individual services. By enabling searches based on attributes such as customer IDs or error messages, regardless of where they originate, global trace search simplifies the process of finding relevant data in complex systems, thus improving efficiency and precision. Available to New Relic Pro customers, this feature is expected to make distributed tracing more valuable, as it provides access to comprehensive data attributes that were previously underutilized.

Since its launch, AWS Lambda has become a widely adopted serverless computing platform, allowing engineers to build and modify functions without managing underlying resources, but it has lacked robust monitoring solutions. Addressing this gap, New Relic has introduced a comprehensive monitoring integration for AWS Lambda within the New Relic One platform, enabling users to effectively monitor, visualize, troubleshoot, and receive alerts on their Lambda functions with detailed performance metrics and error insights. The integration combines CloudWatch data and code-level instrumentation to provide a holistic view of Lambda functions, helping users manage application scaling, control complex environments, and troubleshoot errors efficiently. The New Relic monitoring solution differentiates itself by offering detailed data on function invocations, error rates, and performance, while also supporting distributed tracing to drill down into specific requests and spans that may impact performance. This integration requires configuring AWS accounts to communicate with New Relic and using New Relic agents to instrument Lambda functions, ultimately providing users with a centralized platform to access and analyze AWS Lambda data.

New Relic has introduced new capabilities in its observability platform, New Relic One, which enhance data exploration and visualization through an updated chart builder and dashboards. These enhancements allow users to create dynamic, custom visualizations using a point-and-click interface that simplifies the process for those unfamiliar with New Relic Query Language (NRQL), while also offering an advanced mode for experienced users to directly edit NRQL queries. The platform now supports up to 12-column layouts for dashboards, improving the usability and accessibility of large data sets, and includes features like drag-to-zoom, a correlation needle for pattern identification, and consistent color coding across charts for better data correlation. New Relic One also offers improved integration and access options, including a ubiquitous chart-builder icon, inline scroll features, and various modes for displaying dashboards, such as full-screen and high-contrast dark mode, to enhance legibility and shareability. These updates aim to empower teams to derive actionable insights from complex data, facilitating timely and effective decision-making while maintaining ease of use across different user expertise levels.

The industry's first entity-centric observability platform, New Relic One, presents data from the perspective of entities and their relationships, providing context that was previously lacking in traditional metric-centric approaches. This approach enables users to view each entity individually, considering its dependencies and business outcomes, to truly understand modern software systems. With a broad coverage of monitored entities, including applications, services, instances, hosts, and cloud integrations, New Relic One provides a holistic view of all systems, teams, and technology, automatically creating and maintaining visibility from the data sent by users. This allows for faster troubleshooting, planning changes with confidence, and pinpointing performance optimization opportunities for the biggest impact on customer experience and business outcomes.

New Relic One is an entity-centric observability platform designed to provide context by connecting users to the data generated by various entities in modern software environments. Entities are defined as any data source that can be monitored, ranging from applications and services to cloud integrations and databases, each playing a vital role in the system's functionality. This approach contrasts with traditional metric-centric monitoring by offering a holistic view that emphasizes the interdependencies between entities, allowing for more effective troubleshooting and optimization decisions. By focusing on the relationships and dependencies between entities, New Relic One enables users to quickly identify and address issues that impact business outcomes, facilitating improved customer experiences and operational efficiency.

The guide to optimizing your cloud native environment provides nine hands-on tutorials for using New Relic to optimize business in the cloud. A cloud native optimization strategy consists of three core capabilities: easily adopting new technologies, promoting a culture of experimentation, and effectively scaling the environment. The tutorials cover topics such as establishing objectives and baselines, monitoring performance and usage metrics, promoting a culture of experimentation, managing containerized environments, tracking experience indicators to improve customer experience, and optimizing cloud architecture and spend. By following these tutorials, organizations can enhance their life in the cloud and make the most of its many benefits.

The New Relic Guide to optimizing your cloud-native environment offers nine tutorials aimed at enhancing businesses' cloud experiences, focusing on three core capabilities: adopting new technologies, promoting a culture of experimentation, and scaling effectively. The guide emphasizes the importance of setting objectives and baselines, adopting microservices and cloud services like Kubernetes and AWS Lambda, and using New Relic to monitor performance and optimize service delivery. It also encourages fostering a culture of experimentation through proactive alerting, tracking metrics, and improving the observability of distributed systems. Finally, the guide discusses the need for effective scaling by leveraging data-driven insights to manage containerized environments and optimize cloud architecture and expenditures, ultimately enhancing customer experiences and operational efficiency.

Capacity planning is a crucial aspect of software development that involves ensuring services have enough spare capacity to handle expected workload increases and normal spikes. It's a collaborative effort involving multiple stakeholders, including developers, project managers, and IT operations teams. Capacity planning can be done on short-term or long-term basis, with the former focusing on immediate resource needs and the latter taking a more extended view to accommodate growth and align with business goals. The benefits of capacity planning include efficient resource utilization, cost-savings, enhanced system performance, scalability, and risk mitigation. There are four common methodologies for calculating capacity: service-starvation analysis, load-generation analysis, static-resource analysis, and others. A typical capacity planning process involves calculating free capacity, determining the safest minimum amount of free capacity needed, scaling services to at least n+2 instances, projecting workload growth, and calculating additional capacity needed. Teams should regularly review and iterate on their capacity plans to ensure they remain accurate and effective in preventing production-level incidents.

In modern software environments, particularly those utilizing scalable microservices architectures, capacity planning is essential to prevent production-level incidents due to resource constraints. At New Relic, every engineering team engages in capacity planning to ensure their services can handle workload increases and spikes, dedicating significant initial time to model capacity needs and subsequently requiring only a few hours per quarter for updates. The process involves assessing current free capacity, determining necessary buffer capacity, projecting workload growth, and calculating required capacity to maintain service performance. Various methodologies such as service-starvation analysis, load-generation, and static-resource analysis are employed to measure free capacity, each with its unique approach and considerations. Capacity planning is a collaborative effort involving multiple stakeholders and offers benefits like efficient resource utilization, cost savings, and enhanced system performance. Strategies for effective capacity planning include lag, lead, match, and adjustment strategies, each focusing on aligning project demands with team capabilities and adjusting plans based on evolving needs. Continuous iteration and proactive alerting are recommended to refine capacity forecasts and address potential discrepancies, minimizing capacity-related incidents. Terri Haber, a Site Reliability Champion at New Relic, emphasizes the importance of careful, consistent, and proactive capacity planning, acknowledging that while it may not prevent all incidents, it significantly reduces their occurrence.

The New Relic Applied Intelligence Team has released an improved version of their incident context feature, which helps developers and IT professionals respond to alerts and incidents more efficiently. The new feature automatically detects anomalies in key signals related to applications or hosts that trigger alerts, providing insights into the cause of the issue before it's even visible on the screen. This allows users to quickly identify correlations between separate problems and take action faster. The feature also now uses sparklines to communicate anomalies visually, making it easier to see patterns in the data, and provides more information in the text description of incident content, including hoisting the name of a single service for anomalies where there is only one source. Additionally, the feature now communicates anomaly information via multiple channels, including PagerDuty, Slack, email, and New Relic's mobile app, making it accessible on users' terms.

New Relic's Applied Intelligence Team has developed an incident context feature for New Relic Alerts that quickly identifies anomalous behavior in applications or hosts, helping users respond to alerts more efficiently. Initially released nine months ago, the feature now automatically detects anomalies in key signals such as throughput, latency, errors, and transactions, covering three of the four "golden signals." These insights are integrated into platforms like PagerDuty, Slack, email, and New Relic's mobile app to provide real-time anomaly information, reducing the need for users to switch tools during an incident. The latest enhancements focus on improved signal coverage for New Relic APM and Infrastructure alerts, a more visual representation of data using sparklines to highlight anomalies, and seamless integration to ensure information is readily accessible. These developments aim to streamline the alert response process, allowing users to quickly identify the root causes of issues with minimal setup required. The team continues to refine the feature, welcoming customer feedback to further improve incident response capabilities.