March 2020 Summaries

Workloads in New Relic One are a feature designed to help operations teams quickly understand and resolve issues in complex systems by providing context and insights into how different entities work together to deliver a service. By automatically grouping related entities using existing tags, Workloads displays the most important signals specific to each entity type along with overall health, all in one curated view for quick context and understanding. This feature allows users to quickly navigate from high-level perspectives to low-level troubleshooting tools, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by improving MTTU (mean time to understanding). With Workloads, teams can define rules that dynamically determine which entities belong to a workload, ensuring accurate stacking and reduced toil for teams. The feature also provides an overview screen with key metrics, open violations, linked dashboards, and the ability to automate creation and modification of workloads through the API.

Operations teams managing modern software systems face challenges with complexity, fragmented monitoring, and large volumes of telemetry, which can lead to user dissatisfaction and increased stress. To address these issues and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), New Relic One introduced "Workloads," a feature that groups related entities to provide a comprehensive view of a service's components and performance. This tool leverages New Relic’s existing observability capabilities and tagging system to present users with curated views, helping them quickly spot, isolate, and troubleshoot problems. By improving mean time to understanding (MTTU), Workloads allows teams to move swiftly from high-level overviews to detailed, actionable insights, enhancing their ability to manage dynamic systems efficiently. The system's ability to dynamically determine workload composition and provide key metrics in a consolidated view makes it easier for users to manage and optimize their operational workflows.

OpenTelemetry has announced its first beta release, which includes a specification for consistency across all projects and SDKs in Go, Java, Javascript, Python, and Erlang. This open standard aims to simplify observability by combining OpenTracing and OpenCensus into one project, providing a vendor-neutral path to capturing and sending telemetry. New Relic is supporting this initiative with instrumentation tools that offer customers the freedom to instrument their code once and reconfigure exporters as needed. The company provides exporters for OpenTelemetry's Go and Java SDKs, with plans to add more in the future, and invites customers to help steer the direction of OpenTelemetry support in New Relic One. With its focus on empowering developers to measure software, OpenTelemetry aims to improve the quality of software by providing a complete telemetry system through clean and thoughtful APIs and libraries.

The New Relic One Catalog and Developer Toolkit have been announced in General Availability, allowing users to experience programmability with just a few clicks. The New Relic One Catalog provides a seamless and intuitive way to discover, install, and manage 16-plus global applications, while the Developer Toolkit offers a collection of orchestration tools, including Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and a cross-product command-line interface, to integrate New Relic into existing workflows and enable Observability as Code. These features aim to lower the barrier of entry to adopting New Relic One applications and provide developers with complete control over integrating observability into automation workflows. The Developer Toolkit includes tools such as the New Relic Terraform Provider, Client, CLI, and AWS CloudFormation Integration, which can be used to manage entire ecosystems in a single place, reduce developer toil, and enable quick access to the suite of New Relic APIs.

In September 2019, New Relic announced the programmability feature for building custom applications on the New Relic One platform, and now it has released the General Availability of the New Relic One Catalog and Developer Toolkit. The New Relic One Catalog simplifies the discovery, installation, and management of various applications, while the Developer Toolkit offers orchestration tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and a command-line interface to integrate New Relic into existing workflows. This facilitates Observability as Code, allowing developers to embed New Relic configurations in their code and manage their ecosystems efficiently. New Relic encourages engagement with its programmability features, inviting developers to participate in improving the developer experience and fostering community interaction through forums and direct communication channels.

OpenTelemetry has announced its first beta release, introducing a specification for consistency across projects and SDKs for languages like Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Erlang, marking a significant milestone in the project's development. This release merges OpenTracing and OpenCensus into one open standard, simplifying developer choices and promoting observability with backward compatibility for existing users. OpenTelemetry offers a vendor-neutral approach to telemetry, allowing developers to instrument their code once and send data to multiple backends without modifying existing instrumentation. New Relic supports this initiative, providing exporters for OpenTelemetry’s Go and Java SDKs, aiming to enhance user experience by integrating with New Relic One. While OpenTelemetry is still in beta and not recommended for production use, New Relic encourages exploration and participation in its development. The company emphasizes creating a vendor-neutral platform and invites users to contribute to the evolving support for OpenTelemetry in New Relic One.

We celebrated International Women’s Day by interviewing a handful of our fearless female New Relic employees to learn about their career experiences and gather advice for other women and girls looking to join the tech industry. Gwen Hurd, Senior Enterprise Solution Engineer, emphasizes the importance of being curious, taking certifications, networking, and confidence in pursuing a career in tech. Lindsy Farina, Product Manager, advises against giving up or doubting oneself and encourages women to take initiative, be prepared for an environment dominated by men, and have their voice heard. Guro McCrea, Senior Director of Solutions Engineering, highlights the need for female representation in technology and wants to make a difference by changing recruitment practices. Michaela Schopperle, Sales Director, Enterprise NE, stresses the importance of hard work, results-driven success, and teamwork. Nada Da Veiga, Global VP of Presales, is proud of her accomplishments and encourages women to join the tech industry due to its benefits. Disha Gosalia, Vice President, Customer Success, attributes her success to a growth mindset, overcoming weaknesses, and learning from others. Celine Maher, Senior Director of Corporate Sales & Business Development, EMEA, emphasizes diversity, inclusion, and promoting a minimum standard in technology. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect New Relic's views, but they offer valuable insights for women interested in pursuing careers in tech.

In celebration of International Women’s Day and Women's History Month, New Relic interviewed several female employees to highlight their experiences and provide advice for women and girls aspiring to join the tech industry. These women, including Gwen Hurd, Lindsy Farina, Guro McCrea, Michaela Schopperle, Nada Da Veiga, Disha Gosalia, and Celine Maher, shared stories about their diverse journeys into technology roles, emphasizing perseverance, continuous learning, and the importance of networking. They highlighted challenges such as gender imbalance in tech, and the need for female representation to ensure technology serves all of society. Each shared their proudest achievements, ranging from closing significant sales deals to influencing hiring practices and leading strategic initiatives, demonstrating their impact and leadership within New Relic. The blog underscores New Relic's support for women's career advancement in tech, promoting a culture of diversity and inclusion.

The company has migrated its Synthetics tool to the New Relic One platform, providing customers with improved context and features for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting of critical customer-facing endpoints. With this move, customers can now view immediate and full context into application availability, transactions, errors, performance, and functionality, as well as connect endpoint outages to underlying applications. The new platform also offers additional features such as entity search, location health charts, default charts with filtering capabilities, in-context data, and associated application status. These enhancements aim to help customers quickly find, communicate, and fix outages and latencies, and improve their overall customer experience.

New Relic has integrated its Synthetics monitoring tool into the New Relic One platform, enhancing its capability to proactively alert users about outages and provide detailed insights into their causes, thus enabling quick resolution before users are impacted. This integration offers users full context into their application’s availability, errors, and performance by connecting synthetic data with customer, backend, and infrastructure data. The migration has also introduced new features such as improved entity search, location health insights, and enhanced chart filtering capabilities, allowing users to efficiently monitor and address issues. Additionally, the platform now enables in-context data viewing and application status association, providing a comprehensive view of monitor interactions with APM and Browser applications. These enhancements aim to improve the overall customer experience by facilitating faster identification, communication, and resolution of outages and performance issues.

The world continues to navigate unprecedented challenges due to COVID-19, causing spikes in traffic which puts new stresses on software and systems. Many users are relying on software to purchase groceries, educate homebound children, collaborate remotely, and access video streaming services. Behind the scenes, engineers, developers, operations, and SREs are working tirelessly to keep these services running smoothly, often while managing remote work setups and homebound children. New Relic is committed to supporting businesses in this changing time, with measures such as a business continuity plan, expert support, webinars, and expanded customer donation programs for nonprofits engaged in COVID-19 relief efforts. The company has also implemented work-from-home policies to minimize the spread of the virus while continuing to deliver services. New Relic values feedback from customers and invites them to reach out with suggestions on how it can better serve them.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, New Relic is providing essential support to businesses experiencing increased digital traffic and system stress as they manage remote operations and services critical to daily life, such as groceries, education, and video conferencing. Acknowledging the challenges faced by engineers and developers working remotely, New Relic has enacted a business continuity plan to ensure their platform can handle increased demand and offers a Nonprofit Customer Donation Program to provide free access to their platform for organizations involved in COVID-19 relief efforts. They emphasize their commitment to maintaining digital performance and invite new users to explore resources through the New Relic Explorers Hub for assistance in navigating their observability platform. Additionally, New Relic has implemented work-from-home policies across its global offices to help flatten the curve and remains dedicated to supporting its customers throughout this crisis.

New Relic is launching two initiatives to support COVID-19 relief efforts through its technology and financial resources. The company's Nonprofit Customer Donation Program will provide free access to its platform for 90 days to organizations engaged in direct humanitarian relief, public education delivery, and relief coordination efforts. Additionally, New Relic employees are participating in a $100,000 charitable giving campaign that matches employee donations to local COVID-19 relief nonprofits. The company's Explorers Hub will also offer resources such as training content, product documentation, and support from New Relic employees to help organizations get up and running with its platform. These efforts aim to help organizations cope with the realities of the pandemic by providing access to software tools and supporting local communities in need.

The company has developed a new React Native Mobile agent that allows developers to monitor their pre-production applications and optimize performance for stable, fast, and reliable apps. This new agent provides features such as crash monitoring, custom attributes, mobile breadcrumbs, background monitoring, offline crash monitoring, and flexible sessions, giving developers insight into native crashes, JavaScript errors, and key flows. The agent is designed to be smaller in size compared to the company's current agents, making it suitable for devices with size constraints like smartwatches or small devices. Developers can now harness the capabilities of New Relic One to instrument, measure, and improve their React Native apps, providing a unique perspective across their entire system from end-user to infrastructure.

React Native developers can now leverage New Relic's new open beta React Native Mobile agent to enhance the performance and reliability of their applications through comprehensive monitoring capabilities. Announced at FutureStack 19 in New York City, this agent extends New Relic's platform to support React Native, offering features like JavaScript error tracking, native crash monitoring, custom events, mobile breadcrumbs, and session management. While it doesn't currently monitor HTTP errors or requests, it provides a unique perspective from end-user interactions to infrastructure performance. This advancement allows hybrid mobile app developers to gain actionable insights into their app's performance, even on devices with size constraints such as smartwatches. The new agent is designed to capture offline crashes and ensure session continuity, making it suitable for various user activities. New Relic encourages developers to integrate the agent into their pre-production applications and share feedback, while also clarifying that the views expressed in the blog are those of the author and not necessarily reflective of New Relic's official stance.

New Relic has initiated two significant efforts through its Corporate Social Responsibility program to support COVID-19 relief, offering free 90-day access to its New Relic One platform for organizations engaged in relief efforts and launching a $100,000 charitable giving campaign to match employee donations to local COVID-19 relief nonprofits. The free platform access is available to both nonprofit and other organizations involved in humanitarian relief, education delivery, and relief coordination. New Relic plans to extend free access beyond 90 days for organizations continuing their relief efforts, and it provides resources through its Explorers Hub to help these organizations effectively utilize the platform. Additionally, New Relic encourages employees to contribute to the relief efforts by matching their donations, thereby supporting the communities where they live and work.

When you send data to an observability platform, you have to carefully manage that data, especially sensitive information governed by laws and regulations like PCI or GDPR. To remain compliant, you need to ensure that you don't pass on certain types of data or specific attributes, such as personally identifiable information (PII). An open platform like New Relic can ingest high volumes of metrics, events, logs, and traces from various sources, but managing this data appropriately is crucial. Dropping data gives you control over the data sent to New Relic, allowing you to minimize costs and manage sensitive information. You can drop entire data types or subsets with optional filters using the DROP_DATA action type, or attributes from data types with optional filters using the DROP_ATTRIBUTES action type. By doing so, you can ensure that your teams have confidence in making the most of New Relic's open platform while managing their data effectively.

Managing data sent to an observability platform like New Relic requires careful consideration of compliance with laws such as PCI or GDPR, particularly regarding sensitive information like personally identifiable information (PII). New Relic, an open platform, can ingest extensive metrics, events, logs, and traces from both its agents and third-party sources, but it is crucial to manage the data appropriately to avoid unnecessary costs and compliance issues. Dropping data at ingest, a feature New Relic offers, allows users to control what data is stored in the New Relic Database (NRDB), thus minimizing costs and managing sensitive data by dropping low-value data and specific event attributes. This is achieved by creating drop rules using NerdGraph format and NRQL queries, which specify the data types or attributes to be dropped. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding these processes to effectively utilize New Relic's platform while managing data volume and compliance, and it directs users to additional resources for configuring data drop rules and exploring the capabilities of NRDB.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a new metric developed by Google to measure how fast the main content of a webpage is displayed to the user, with the goal of improving customer experience and page performance. LCP measures when the largest element visible to the user was rendered, including images, blocks of text, and videos, and is now available in real user monitoring (RUM) tools such as New Relic. To improve LCP, teams can optimize load times, reduce load delays, and improve time to first byte by removing render-blocking resources, rendering LCP elements immediately after resource loading, optimizing resource load time, and improving server-side caching and database configuration. Understanding your best opportunities for improvement is crucial, and using tools like New Relic's browser agent can help track and analyze LCP values. With the increasing importance of page performance and customer experience, LCP has become a vital metric to measure and improve, especially in search engines where it will likely impact how many visitors come to a site.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a metric introduced by Google to assess how quickly the main content of a webpage is visible to users, playing a significant role in Google's algorithm and thus impacting web performance and customer experience. LCP measures when the largest element, such as an image or block of text, is rendered in the viewport, excluding elements outside the viewport and background images. Tools like Google Search Console, WebPageTest, and Chrome DevTools' Lighthouse can measure LCP, but New Relic offers a more robust solution by capturing LCP metrics with its browser agent, taking into account intricacies like user interaction and providing detailed insights into performance bottlenecks. Improving LCP involves optimizing load times, reducing resource load delays, and ensuring efficient server performance. As LCP becomes more critical for user retention and search engine visibility, New Relic's monitoring capabilities allow teams to benchmark and enhance their website's LCP, ensuring a better user experience and potentially improving search engine rankings.

New Relic is introducing real-time Java profiling and a JVM cluster timeline view to help developers better understand performance bottlenecks in their Java applications and services. The feature uses data from the Java Flight Recorder (JFR) open-sourced by Oracle, allowing for low-overhead continuous profiling of Java code in production environments. The cluster timeline view provides a fast and intuitive way to diagnose cluster-wide performance problems, while the detailed view offers insights into code execution performance, resource allocation within processes, inefficient garbage collection, and connections with logs. These features are available in New Relic One, where developers can incorporate them with other critical observability data.

New Relic has introduced real-time Java profiling and a JVM cluster timeline view to improve troubleshooting and performance diagnostics for Java applications. These tools allow developers to gain insights into runtime characteristics and performance bottlenecks by utilizing contributions from the Java community, such as the Java Flight Recorder. The real-time profiling, which is suitable for production environments due to its low overhead, enables continuous monitoring of Java code, while the JVM cluster timeline view offers a comprehensive overview of the JVM's behavior over time. This facilitates quick detection of issues such as JVM shutdowns, restarts, and deployment impacts on the cluster. Additionally, features like flamegraphs and garbage collection graphs help identify code execution bottlenecks and inefficient resource allocation, while integration with New Relic Logs allows for deeper analysis by correlating profiling data with log information. These functionalities are part of New Relic One, which integrates real-time profiling with broader observability data, and further information is accessible through New Relic's documentation and community forums.

Serverless architecture has become increasingly popular as businesses migrate away from traditional infrastructure management, but it's essential to understand its limitations and benefits before making the switch. Serverless is not a one-size-fits-all solution, ideal for event-driven architectural patterns where applications are divided into small, loosely coupled components aligned to business needs. It offers advantages such as automatic scaling, high availability, and cost-effectiveness, but also presents unique challenges like observability and security. The pricing model is execution-based, with costs varying depending on the number of requests and duration, while observability requires careful instrumentation to track performance across the entire ecosystem. By understanding these key aspects, businesses can make informed decisions about whether serverless architecture is right for them.

Serverless architecture is gaining traction as businesses seek to reduce the complexity and resources associated with traditional infrastructure management by leveraging cloud providers to handle server maintenance, scaling, and security. Despite its name, serverless still relies on virtual machines and containers, but these are managed by third-party providers, allowing applications to operate in stateless, event-driven environments without direct server management. This model offers benefits like execution-based pricing, auto-scalability, and increased agility, but also presents challenges in observability, particularly in distributed systems with numerous invocations. The decision to adopt serverless should align with specific business needs and architectural patterns, as it is not universally suitable for all applications. While serverless is ideal for event-driven architectures, companies must weigh its advantages against potential limitations, especially in cases where traditional infrastructure elements like virtual private clouds are involved.

The Java ecosystem is vast and diverse, making it difficult to draw a single conclusion about its market. However, by analyzing data from tens of millions of Java virtual machines (JVMs) that share their data with New Relic, researchers have gained insights into the state of the Java ecosystem. The most popular Java version used in production environments is still Java 8, but there is a growing acceptance of non-Oracle Java vendors, such as AdoptOpenJDK. The adoption rate of Java 11 is increasing, and it has become the second most popular vendor after Oracle. Garbage collection algorithms also vary widely among different JVM versions, with CMS being more popular than G1 on Java 8, while ZGC is significantly less popular on Java 11. Heap size configurations are relatively small, with only a few percent of systems using heaps larger than 16GB. The "pinned heap" flag combination is still widely used, but it can be counterproductive for modern workloads. Overall, the data provides a snapshot of the Java ecosystem and highlights areas where improvement is needed.

In a webinar titled Kubernetes in the Wild: Best Practices for K8s Adoption, Stijn Polfliet, New Relic's Kubernetes evangelist, outlines a 5-stage framework to help organizations gain confidence in their Kubernetes environments. This framework enables users to better understand the overall health and capacity of their clusters, track dynamic behavior, correlate log data, and obtain essential telemetry data. By following this model, organizations can improve their ability to monitor and manage their Kubernetes environments, ultimately leading to increased efficiency and performance.

The report on the Java ecosystem reveals that Java remains a dominant programming language across various industries, though assessing its market status is complex due to its widespread use. Java 8 continues to be the most used version, with Java 11 gaining traction, while non-Oracle vendors like AdoptOpenJDK are increasingly popular. Despite the evolution of garbage collection algorithms, the CMS collector remains favored over others in specific Java versions. Interestingly, the community still uses smaller heap sizes, and many Java virtual machines retain outdated or redundant configurations. The data, though not exhaustive, offers a snapshot of trends and behaviors within the Java community, aiming to contribute to ongoing discussions about Java's future trajectory. The insights are derived from anonymized data collected from millions of JVMs monitored by New Relic, acknowledging potential biases and the influence of localized trends.

Stijn Polfliet, a Principal Technical Evangelist at New Relic, presents a 5-stage framework for improving confidence in Kubernetes environments during his webinar, "Kubernetes in the Wild: Best Practices for K8s Adoption." This maturity model aims to enhance understanding of cluster health, track dynamic behaviors such as autoscaling, facilitate microservices communication analysis, correlate log data, and capture essential telemetry for performance assessment. The framework is detailed in an accompanying infographic, available for download, while the blog post emphasizes that the expressed views are the author's own and not reflective of New Relic's official stance. Polfliet, who has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and was co-founder of CoScale, focuses on cloud technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, especially in relation to their performance aspects.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. It simplifies the deployment and operation of containerized applications by introducing an abstraction layer on a group of hosts, allowing DevOps teams to focus on building container-delivered applications while Kubernetes manages other tasks. A Kubernetes cluster is made up of nodes that run containerized applications, with each node representing a single machine in the cluster. Pods are the basic unit of scheduling for applications running on the cluster and comprise one or more containers. Containers are standalone executable packages that include everything needed to run an application, while pods provide the environment for containers to run in a coordinated way, sharing the same network IP, port space, and storage. Understanding the relationship between clusters, nodes, pods, and containers is essential to unlocking Kubernetes' capabilities and achieving operational excellence and scalability.

New Relic has reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring its customers' systems continue to perform during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company's Crisis Management Team has implemented a business continuity program with redundancies for remote teams, enabling workforce members to work safely and securely from home. New Relic continues to monitor updates and adjust its approach to deliver on its commitment while prioritizing employee safety and well-being, and providing exclusive support through the Explorers Hub.

In response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, New Relic reaffirms its dedication to ensuring the functionality of its products and services, emphasizing the importance of software reliability during global crises. The company has a Crisis Management Team and a business continuity program to minimize disruptions, enabling a secure remote work environment for its global workforce. Operational practices are designed to support remote and distributed teams, with continuous monitoring in place to adapt strategies accordingly. The blog post, authored by Shaun Gordon, New Relic's VP and Chief Information Security Officer, represents his personal views and not necessarily those of New Relic, and invites readers to the Explorers Hub for further discussion and support.

Kubernetes, introduced in 2014 and originally developed by Google, is an open-source platform that has transformed how development and operations teams deploy, manage, and scale container-based applications by providing powerful orchestration and automation capabilities. It simplifies the deployment and operation of containerized applications by using a cluster system where individual machines, known as nodes, execute tasks orchestrated by a central control plane or master. Containers, which package applications with all their necessary components, run within pods, the smallest deployable units in Kubernetes, which can house one or more containers. This structure allows for efficient resource management and application scaling, addressing the challenges of distributed microservices environments. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration and is supported by major tech companies like Google, AWS, Microsoft, and IBM. Understanding how components like clusters, nodes, and pods interact is essential for leveraging Kubernetes' full potential, as it abstracts infrastructure details, enabling DevOps teams to focus on building applications while Kubernetes handles deployment and scaling tasks.

AWS Lambda functions are critical parts of serverless applications and require instant visibility into which service triggered a function invocation to build observability. New Relic Serverless for AWS Lambda has released event sources for Node.js and Python, providing context about the AWS service triggering each invocation, including metrics such as duration, errors, and external calls. The feature allows developers to instantly identify issues caused by upstream or connecting services, making it easier to debug serverless applications. Additionally, New Relic Serverless now offers logs in context, a Facet Builder for custom insights, and bulk CLI installer to simplify monitoring and troubleshooting of AWS Lambda functions.

AWS Lambda functions are integral to serverless architectures, acting as essential components within event-driven systems. As these applications become more complex, understanding which services trigger Lambda functions is key for maintaining observability and diagnosing issues. To enhance this capability, New Relic has introduced event sources for Node.js and Python, offering users immediate insights into AWS services that initiate Lambda function calls. This new feature provides metrics such as duration, invocation counts, and errors, all linked to specific AWS services. Additionally, New Relic's tools, like the Facet Builder and logs in context, enable developers to analyze and troubleshoot serverless applications more efficiently by correlating metrics and logs. Users can update to the latest version to access these features, which are available across New Relic's Serverless plans. Adam Johnson, a Principal Product Manager at New Relic, emphasizes the ease these tools bring in managing serverless applications.

We've successfully integrated New Relic Infrastructure and Logs with Linux on mainframe hardware, enabling customers to gather logs alongside infrastructure data in the New Relic platform. This integration uses plugins like Fluentd and Flex to simplify log management and provide valuable insights into system performance and security. The process involves creating a VM running on mainframe hardware, installing New Relic Infrastructure, setting up Fluentd for mainframe logs, and adding Flex for New Relic. This allows customers to collect metrics from a wide variety of services without writing code, providing a powerful tool for driving business innovation in industries like banking, healthcare, and insurance.

New Relic explores the potential of utilizing its Infrastructure and Logs capabilities on mainframe hardware, specifically targeting Linux on mainframes to address customer needs for data security and processing power in industries like banking and healthcare. Mainframes, known for handling up to 1 trillion web transactions daily, present an opportunity for users to gather and visualize logs alongside infrastructure data via New Relic's platform. By using Fluentd and New Relic's Flex integration, New Relic simplifies log management and allows for the collection of metrics from various services without requiring code, expanding the utility of mainframes in secure data environments. This initiative is seen as an exciting discovery for many potential customers and highlights New Relic's commitment to driving business innovation through enhanced data monitoring solutions.

The world of SRE and DevOps teams is focused on fast responses to diagnose and resolve problems efficiently. Effective teams measure and manage their on-call cycle continuously to minimize incident response time, but few have leveraged the relationships between detection, understanding, and resolution stages. Common KPIs include mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to understand (MTTU), and mean time to resolution (MTTR). Traditional approaches like hiring more engineers or training existing ones may only address one KPI, potentially making others worse. Event intelligence and automatic correlations can help improve all three by leveraging relationships between stages. A tool like New Relic AI automatically discovers correlations in event data across the full stack, improving MTTD, MTTU, and MTTR by providing customized logic based on production system knowledge, enriched context for correlated issues, and suggested responders to accelerate resolution. This approach minimizes customer impact and is an AIOps solution for busy SRE and DevOps teams.

In the fast-paced world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps, rapid incident response is crucial for minimizing operational costs and maintaining service quality. New Relic AI offers a solution by using event intelligence and automatic correlations to improve key performance indicators (KPIs) such as mean time to detect, understand, and resolve incidents. By leveraging the interconnected nature of these stages, the platform enhances the efficiency of the SRE cycle, offering features like customized decision-making, natural language processing for smart incident summaries, and machine learning models for suggesting appropriate responders. This holistic approach helps teams quickly diagnose and resolve issues, reducing the impact on customers and optimizing overall system performance. Guy Fighel, the author and New Relic's General Manager of Applied Intelligence, emphasizes that these AI-driven solutions are tailored to specific environments and are designed to harness the existing knowledge within teams for improved incident management.

Developers are shifting their focus from writing extensive code to leveraging managed services integrations and third-party APIs, which may lead to a significant reduction in the amount of supporting code needed in applications. According to Alex Casalboni, Technical Evangelist at AWS, this trend is expected to become more prevalent in 2020, driven by cultural and technical changes within organizations. Smaller teams and training programs are recommended as approaches to overcome organizational challenges, while technical improvements and innovations such as Amazon EventBridge and Custom Runtimes are expected to simplify developers' lives. The goal of serverless adoption in 2020 is to achieve "less code" writing, leveraging managed services integrations and APIs to solve problems and satisfy customers' needs more efficiently.

In 2020, the adoption of serverless computing is expected to lead developers to write less code, focusing instead on integrating managed services and third-party APIs. Alex Casalboni, a Technical Evangelist at AWS, notes that the technology is mature, with many technical challenges already addressed, and suggests that the main organizational challenges will be cultural and technical changes. He recommends investing in training and smaller teams to overcome these challenges. The serverless trend, which some refer to as "serviceful," emphasizes problem-solving and customer satisfaction over code writing. Misconceptions about serverless performance are being dispelled, particularly with enhancements like no more VPC cold starts and provisioned concurrency, which address latency concerns. The article highlights the shift towards serverless as a new norm in development, with increased opportunities for migration and innovation in cloud architecture.

New Relic has obtained Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Authority to Operate (ATO) with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), enabling it to operate as a Cloud Service Provider for systems at the FIPS 199 "Moderate" impact level, providing government agencies with a secure cloud solution. The FedRAMP ATO is a validation that New Relic has a solid security program in place, ensuring customers' data is secure and compliant with government standards. This achievement demonstrates the growing recognition of cloud services as secure enough for government use, allowing agencies to easily adopt and utilize New Relic's cloud-based solutions without extensive security reviews. The FedRAMP certification process involves 325 security controls, which require significant documentation, audits, and remediation efforts, but ultimately provides a high level of assurance for customers that New Relic's security measures are robust and effective.

New Relic has secured the FedRAMP Authority to Operate (ATO) from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, allowing it to function as a Cloud Service Provider for systems classified at the FIPS 199 "Moderate" impact level. This certification process, which took almost two years, involves implementing and being audited against 325 security controls, underscoring New Relic's commitment to robust security measures. Although the process is rigorous and requires companies to make adjustments to meet compliance, it is seen as a validation of New Relic's security program by both federal and non-federal customers. FedRAMP certification not only facilitates easier adoption of New Relic's services by government agencies but also reassures other clients of its high security standards. This move reflects the government's increasing acceptance of cloud services, aligning with modernization efforts and mirroring the enterprise sector's earlier transition to cloud technologies.

New Relic's observability platform is only as good as its ability to correlate spikes in dashboards with real system activity. Chaos engineering, a practice that simulates controlled experiments to uncover weaknesses in systems, can help identify issues before they become problems for users. When paired with New Relic, chaos engineering tools like Gremlin provide deep visibility into the behavior of systems under attack. A game day, a simulated emergency scenario, was used by New Relic and Gremlin to demonstrate the value of their platforms in identifying critical issues before they impact users. By using Gremlin to simulate real-world failure scenarios, customers can gain confidence in New Relic's monitoring and alerting capabilities and improve their incident response protocols.

In a collaborative effort between New Relic and Gremlin, a controlled outage was orchestrated to demonstrate the efficacy of New Relic's observability platform. This exercise, often referred to as a "game day," involved simulating real-world failure scenarios to test and improve incident response protocols. By introducing controlled chaos, such as adding latency to a customer's Cassandra database, New Relic's platform successfully identified and alerted teams to various issues, enabling them to trace failures back to their root causes. The exercise highlighted the importance of chaos engineering in uncovering system weaknesses before they impact users and reinforced the value of robust monitoring and alerting systems. The collaborative game day not only improved the customer's incident management processes but also increased their confidence in New Relic's capabilities, demonstrating the practical benefits of combining observability with chaos engineering to enhance system resilience.