December 2019 Summaries

2019 is coming to a close, and we're looking ahead to 2020. In the world of infrastructure and application development, several trends are expected to emerge. No-Ops will eventually die as organizations recognize the value in their Ops teams. Global regions that have been slow to adopt DevOps will finally get on board, with more companies introducing DevOps practices into their organizations. AIOps tools will become easier to implement, learn, and use, with a focus on simplicity and flexibility. Serverless computing will continue to evolve, with businesses learning how to optimize for busy seasons and functions-as-a-service offerings getting more capable. Competition in the cloud market is expected to increase, with Microsoft Azure becoming a strong option, while Google's growth will be slower than Azure's. Companies will start second-guessing their "all-in-on-the-cloud" strategies and focus on balanced use of the cloud and private data centers. Kubernetes' complexity problems will continue to be solved gradually, and engineers with deep knowledge of Kubernetes will remain in high demand. The growth of OpenJDK is expected to increase, while Rust will continue its slow but steady rise. Serverless platforms will enforce statelessness, and legacy enterprises will become serverless innovators alongside cloud-native companies. Finally, 2020 will be a breakthrough year in end-to-end observability solutions, with open source software playing a key role.

As 2019 closes, industry experts predict significant developments in infrastructure and application development for 2020, highlighting trends in DevOps, AIOps, serverless computing, cloud services, and programming languages. Companies are expected to move away from "No-Ops" and embrace the value of Ops teams, while DevOps practices are anticipated to gain traction globally. AIOps tools are predicted to become more user-friendly, driving broader adoption to enhance digital transformations. Serverless computing is foreseen to optimize resource allocation during peak times, with functions-as-a-service evolving to handle more complex workloads. Competition in the cloud services market is expected to intensify, particularly with Microsoft Azure gaining ground against AWS and Google. The complexity of managing Kubernetes will continue to challenge organizations, prompting a demand for skilled engineers and improved observability tools. The Java ecosystem will see a shift towards OpenJDK due to changes in Oracle's support policies, while Rust's popularity is expected to grow as a viable alternative to C++. Furthermore, the rise of serverless platforms will encourage legacy enterprises to innovate alongside cloud-native companies, with a focus on achieving comprehensive end-to-end observability solutions.

FirstPaint` and `firstContentfulPaint` metrics provide insight into when a user perceives a website as ready to use, but these metrics don't always occur in a consistent time frame. In contrast, interactivity metrics such as `firstInteraction`, `firstInputDelay`, and `longRunningTasksCount` measure how long it takes for a web page to become usable, allowing developers to identify performance issues and optimize their code. These metrics can be used to improve customer experience by correlating perceived performance with business KPIs, eliminating performance issues in pre-production, writing code that utilizes performance budgets, testing code in a lab environment, deploying code with alerts and telemetry data, performing competitive benchmarking, and using real user monitoring in the production environment. By leveraging these metrics, developers can gain a better understanding of their website's performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize their digital customer experience.

In the dynamic landscape of modern web development, understanding user-centric performance metrics is crucial for enhancing digital customer experiences. Traditional metrics like page load time are inadequate for today's complex sites, prompting the need for metrics that shed light on perceived performance and interactivity, such as firstPaint, firstContentfulPaint, firstInteraction, and firstInputDelay (FID). These metrics, available in tools like New Relic, help developers gauge the usability of web pages by measuring when users perceive content as ready and when they can interact with it. Additionally, longRunningTasksCount metrics identify performance bottlenecks caused by slow-loading elements, enhancing site responsiveness. By analyzing these metrics, developers can improve customer experience, correlate performance with business KPIs, and eliminate issues in both pre-production and production environments. This approach not only aids in optimizing web pages but also provides a framework for competitive benchmarking in the digital marketplace.

New Relic is a leading observability platform that helps organizations detect and resolve potential issues quickly and efficiently by leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies. The company's Cloud Adoption Solution for AWS delivers a data-driven approach to observability, enabling customers to scale their application and infrastructure operations. New Relic has recently announced several updates to its Cloud Adoption Solution, including the launch of a new application built on New Relic One, which provides a comprehensive view of cloud migration projects. The company has also received industry accolades for its work with AWS, including recognition as the Best Cloud Migration Tool of the Year by Computing UK and the AWS Public Sector Migration Technology Partner Award in 2019. Additionally, New Relic continues to invest in supporting AWS technologies, integrating with several management and governance tools, and partnering with managed service providers and technology partners to help customers procure, deploy, and implement technology faster.

As organizations increasingly migrate to the cloud, they face the challenge of effectively observing data from diverse sources to promptly address potential issues. New Relic collaborates with AWS and other partners to offer a data-driven approach to observability, facilitating the scaling of application and infrastructure operations. The company has announced updates to its Cloud Adoption Solution for AWS, designed to mitigate risks and expedite migration, modernization, and optimization processes. This solution combines people, processes, and technology to provide a comprehensive understanding of cloud migration. New Relic has gained industry recognition, including awards for its cloud migration tools, and continues to invest in the AWS ecosystem by integrating with various AWS tools and expanding partnerships with managed service providers and technology partners. Notable announcements include new integrations with AWS services and the launch of New Relic Logs for AWS FireLens, enhancing visibility into containerized services. Case studies, like that of World Fuel Services, demonstrate the practical benefits of these innovations, which have also been shown to significantly reduce cloud expenditure according to a Forrester study.

To achieve observability of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, you need a connected view that accounts for all entities spread across your AWS hosts and services. New Relic has announced 10 new cloud integrations for AWS, adding to its already significant list of powerful integrations for the New Relic platform. These integrations gather data using the AWS CloudWatch API and each integration comes with a set of New Relic One entities and a load of metrics. To use these integrations, you'll need a New Relic Infrastructure Pro account and connect your Amazon account to New Relic Infrastructure. The latest AWS cloud integrations from New Relic include Amazon MQ, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, AWS Step Functions, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), AWS WAF, AWS AppSync, and AWS QLDB. These integrations provide data on various metrics such as connections, CPU utilization, storage usage, latency, and more. New Relic sets you up for AWS success by providing essential observability and integrating with other services like EKS monitoring or Lambda monitoring to gain full speed, scalability, flexibility, and resiliency of operating in the cloud.

AWS and New Relic are introducing three new capabilities for customers using AWS Lambda and New Relic Serverless: Provisioned Concurrency for AWS Lambda, provisioned concurrency metrics for New Relic Serverless, and a new CLI installer for New Relic Serverless. Provisioned Concurrency gives users greater control over the start time of their Lambda functions, allowing them to keep functions initialized and hyper-ready to respond in double-digit milliseconds. This feature provides a new pricing dimension that pays for keeping functions initialized, and can be enabled or disabled through various AWS management console options. New Relic Serverless will provide detailed metrics on functions using Provisioned Concurrency, including serverless performance insights and end-to-end visibility of components impacting function execution. Additionally, New Relic's CLI installer makes it easier to instrument observability into serverless applications, allowing developers and operations teams to install and configure the New Relic AWS Lambda Layer directly from the CLI.

New Relic has announced the addition of 10 new AWS integrations to its platform, enhancing the ability to monitor AWS infrastructure through a connected view that encompasses various AWS services. These integrations utilize the AWS CloudWatch API to collect a wide range of metrics specific to services like Amazon MQ, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and AWS Step Functions, among others. To leverage these integrations, users need a New Relic Infrastructure Pro account and must connect their Amazon account to New Relic Infrastructure. The integrations are designed to offer essential observability for AWS environments, facilitating faster and more confident operations, especially when combined with other New Relic services such as EKS and AWS Lambda monitoring. The blog post also emphasizes New Relic's comprehensive approach to optimizing cloud-native environments through an instrumentation and data-oriented strategy for managing performance and availability.

AWS and New Relic have announced new capabilities to enhance serverless computing for New Relic customers using AWS Lambda, including Provisioned Concurrency for AWS Lambda and provisioned concurrency metrics for New Relic Serverless. Provisioned Concurrency allows AWS users to have greater control over the start time of their Lambda functions, keeping them initialized and ready to respond quickly to spikes in demand, while New Relic provides detailed metrics on these functions to help monitor and troubleshoot performance issues. Additionally, New Relic has introduced a command-line interface (CLI) installer for easier observability setup with AWS Lambda, catering to Node.js and Python runtimes, which simplifies the process of configuring and upgrading New Relic layers without code changes. These innovations were highlighted at AWS re:Invent, where New Relic also hosted events to engage the serverless community and promote collaboration among developers building the next generation of serverless applications.

The article highlights the importance of customer experience in digital businesses and how distributed tracing can help resolve and prevent outages. New Relic's distributed tracing capabilities have been enhanced with support for end-user traces in New Relic Browser, allowing customers to monitor the entire lifespan of a trace and gain end-to-end visibility into application performance issues. This feature is now available at no extra charge to customers with a New Relic APM subscription and a Browser Pro agent configured for single-page application (SPA) monitoring. The addition of distributed tracing in New Relic provides teams with greater visibility, enabling them to isolate issues faster and find the root cause of problems, ultimately leading to improved performance and customer satisfaction.

You can collect and use Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) metrics in New Relic by setting up an MSK cluster and integrating it with Prometheus OpenMetrics integration. To set up the cluster, you need to create a definition file (in JSON), discover the DNS name of your Kafka node, choose the node that is in your subnet, document this information, confirm you can access the Prometheus endpoints, and set up the New Relic Prometheus OpenMetrics integration by creating a configuration file, configuring the Amazon MSK endpoints targets, adding the HTTP endpoint to collect metrics about the integration itself, and starting the integration. After getting the integration running, it will immediately start sending Amazon MSK metrics to New Relic, allowing you to monitor various aspects of your Kafka cluster, such as disk usage, producer request rate, and storage thresholds, and create alerts to ensure a healthy pipeline.

Apache Kafka is widely used by companies like New Relic, Uber, and Square for building scalable and reliable real-time streaming systems, yet its management can be complex. Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) simplifies this by handling Kafka management and exposing metrics in a Prometheus-compatible format, which can be integrated with New Relic's Prometheus OpenMetrics for enhanced monitoring. This integration allows users to combine MSK metrics with other data sources in New Relic One, facilitating comprehensive observability across application stacks. The article details the setup process for an Amazon MSK cluster, configuration of the New Relic integration, and examples of using metrics for monitoring Kafka nodes, such as tracking filesystem usage and producer request rates, as well as setting alerts for storage thresholds. Written by JF Joly, a New Relic product manager, the blog emphasizes the environment-specific nature of the solutions provided and directs readers to the Explorers Hub for further discussion and support.

In the competitive landscape of digital business, maintaining optimal customer experience is crucial, and outages can be costly, with Gartner estimating the average cost at $5,600 per minute. Distributed tracing, specifically through New Relic One, provides essential visibility into applications, helping teams track transaction requests across complex, interconnected back-end services to diagnose and prevent outages. This capability is enhanced by New Relic's support for end-user traces, giving complete visibility from the browser through to back-end services, thus allowing DevOps teams to isolate issues and address latency or errors efficiently. By integrating open-source tools like Zipkin and OpenTelemetry, New Relic One enables a comprehensive understanding of transaction lifecycles, facilitating faster resolution of incidents and improved coordination between front-end and back-end teams.