April 2020 Summaries

This infographic provides an overview of distributed tracing in digital environments, defining traces and explaining two common types of sampling methods. It also outlines the benefits of using New Relic to debug applications more efficiently by breaking down the process into three key steps. By adopting distributed tracing, organizations can improve application performance monitoring and gain valuable insights into their systems.

The benefits of developing applications using microservices are clear, but it also introduces greater complexity in managing and troubleshooting distributed systems. To cut through this complexity, distributed tracing enables teams to track the path of each transaction as it travels through a distributed system, analyzing the interaction with every service it touches. This capability helps teams understand performance, visualize service dependencies, resolve performance issues quickly, measure overall system health, prioritize high-value areas for improvement, and gain insight into how to prevent reoccurrence. However, not all traces are equally actionable, and traditional head-based sampling methods may miss critical errors or unusual latency in high-throughput systems. Tail-based sampling provides a solution by observing and analyzing 100% of traces, allowing teams to visualize traces with errors or uncharacteristic slowness more quickly and pinpoint exactly where issues are. The flexibility to choose between different sampling methods based on the use case and cost/benefit analysis is essential in managing complex distributed systems.

The transition from monoliths to microservices offers software teams increased flexibility and deployment speed, but it also introduces complexity, particularly in managing distributed systems where services have numerous dependencies and varied technologies. This complexity can complicate troubleshooting, especially when issues arise in real-world environments that combine legacy monoliths with microservices. Distributed tracing is a valuable tool for understanding and resolving performance issues by tracking transactions through a system, visualizing service dependencies, and identifying bottlenecks. The blog discusses two sampling methods for distributed tracing: head-based sampling, which randomly selects traces early in the process and is suitable for lower transaction environments, and tail-based sampling, which analyzes all traces post-completion to capture critical data about errors and latency. The choice between these methods depends on specific needs and cost considerations, underscoring the importance of flexibility in monitoring strategies as application environments grow increasingly complex.

The collaboration between New Relic and Google Cloud continues to deliver a strong portfolio of solutions for joint customers. The New Relic One platform already provides a unique observability solution for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) deployments, and today it announces support for Windows Containers on GKE and Google Cloud Anthos, allowing Windows and Linux containers to be run side-by-side in the same cluster. This enables the deployment and modernization of Windows server-based applications on Google Cloud. New Relic One provides a comprehensive observability platform that delivers data gathering, visualization, and analysis of metrics, events, logs, and traces in one place, cutting through complexity and providing context for multi-cloud deployments. The platform offers Kubernetes monitoring capabilities, including a cluster explorer that simplifies monitoring of complex Kubernetes deployments, and provides solutions for Windows nodes and containers on GKE, allowing teams to observe frontend and backend applications as well as the underlying hosts running clusters. New Relic also provides logging, event correlation, and distributed tracing capabilities, enabling customers to capture the natural dynamic behavior of a Kubernetes Cluster and provide a curated dashboard experience that abstracts and demystifies the complexity of the Kubernetes and serverless deployment stack.

New Relic and Google Cloud have enhanced their collaboration by supporting Windows Containers on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Google Cloud Anthos, allowing Windows and Linux containers to operate simultaneously in the same cluster, which accelerates the deployment of Windows server-based applications on Google Cloud. The New Relic One platform offers a comprehensive observability solution for Kubernetes deployments, providing data gathering, visualization, and analysis of metrics, events, logs, and traces in one place, thereby enabling full insight into multi-cloud deployments. Its Kubernetes monitoring capabilities include a cluster explorer, allowing teams to monitor performance, dependencies, and issues across any Kubernetes environment. The solution facilitates monitoring, alerting, and dashboarding for Kubernetes entities and services, with features like distributed tracing to track request paths and New Relic Logs to provide logging context. The integration with Google Cloud and Istio metrics further enhances monitoring capabilities, ensuring an intuitive and cohesive experience for managing complex Kubernetes and serverless deployments, thus supporting customers in modernizing infrastructure and accelerating their cloud journey.

New Relic's Partner Network (NRPN) is designed to enable partners to leverage the observability platform as they go-to-market with a solutions approach, providing ease of engagement and flexible business models. The NRPN includes a Technology Partner Program that enables hundreds of existing integration partners to participate in go-to-market benefits and create New Relic One applications with programmability features. This program aims to deepen relationships with technology partners and provide opportunities for customers to get more value from the platform. The NRPN also expands and tailors program benefits for channel partners, including consulting partners, SIs, and MSPs. With its robust portfolio of integrations with cloud providers, New Relic provides a fully open, connected, and programmable observability platform to accelerate customer cloud journeys. The company is calling its ecosystem the New Relic Partner Network, reflecting its strategic importance in delivering New Relic One around the globe to both new and existing customers and partners alike.

New Relic has introduced the New Relic Partner Network (NRPN) to enhance collaboration with partners as businesses increasingly move to the cloud, requiring comprehensive observability platforms. NRPN aims to integrate and support cloud-native, DevOps, and application modernization initiatives through a flexible business model that allows partners to leverage the New Relic observability platform to provide predictable outcomes. The initiative includes a Technology Partner Program, enabling integration partners to benefit from go-to-market opportunities and create applications using New Relic's programmability features. By collaborating with major cloud ecosystems such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and engaging with systems integrators, managed service providers, and resellers, New Relic seeks to accelerate cloud migration and application deployment, optimizing costs and improving the digital customer experience. Additionally, New Relic leverages cloud marketplaces to streamline procurement processes and align financial incentives for partners, ultimately aiming to simplify and enhance the cloud journey for customers.

When working with distributed logging, a developer's first instinct might be to send application logs directly from their application to a logging backend over transactional REST APIs. However, this approach can lead to issues such as backpressure on HTTP requests, latencies causing lags in transmission of log data, and network connectivity problems leading to lost logs. Decoupling the log forwarder from the application code can make the system less fragile by keeping complex processing computations separate and updating configurations without affecting underlying applications. Log forwarders provide built-in memory or file-based buffering, flexibility for latencies and interruptions, and support for various network protocols and output formats. Choosing a suitable log forwarder is crucial, with options like Logstash, Rsyslog, Fluentd, Wayfair's Tremor, and Timber.io's Vector available. These forwarders can be used in co-located or separately located configurations, with load balancing providing scalability and high availability. Enriching, filtering, and routing logs can further improve the log forwarding process by adding or altering content to records, excluding unwanted content, and sending different types of logs to different backends. Ultimately, a well-designed log forwarding system can reduce fragility and ensure observability in distributed systems.

New Relic has been named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring for the eighth time in a row by influential analyst firm Gartner. The company's New Relic One observability platform continues to move up and to the right, reflecting its ability to execute and completeness of vision. With its focus on helping customers solve their toughest IT challenges, New Relic is trusted and loved by customers across various industries, including cloud adoption and DevOps, delivering high-quality digital customer experiences. The company's open, connected, and programmable platform provides a single observability solution for all critical data, with applied intelligence and automation technologies that seamlessly fit into unique business processes. New Relic continues to expand its capabilities, supporting modern, cloud-native technologies and improving digital customer experience, while also simplifying complex software environments and providing support for serverless environments.

New Relic has been recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring for the eighth consecutive time, owing to its ability to execute and completeness of vision. The company continues to innovate with its New Relic One observability platform, which integrates digital experience monitoring, infrastructure, logs, metrics, analytics, and programmability. This platform supports modern software technologies, allowing customers to optimize software and improve customer experiences. New Relic's flexibility in ingesting data from any source, including competing products, empowers enterprises to develop customized views of their environments. With expanded support for serverless and cloud-native technologies, New Relic also emphasizes its dedication to enhancing AI-powered operations and log management capabilities. The company's roadmap includes further support for public clouds and modern architectures, reflecting its commitment to addressing complex IT challenges and delivering high-quality digital customer experiences.

The public cloud is often perceived as an insecure place to store sensitive data, but this misconception may be misplaced. Public cloud providers have significant experience and expertise in keeping data safe and secure, which is a core competency for their business. They invest heavily in building high-quality security teams and share their knowledge and best practices with customers through tools and services. This partnership approach can provide an added layer of security, as both the customer and the provider are motivated to keep the data safe. In contrast, on-premises data centers rely solely on the customer's expertise and motivation to ensure security, which may not be enough to guarantee safety.

Contrary to traditional beliefs, storing sensitive data in the public cloud may be safer than keeping it behind a company's firewall due to the robust security measures implemented by cloud providers. These providers prioritize data security as a core business principle, investing heavily in advanced security protocols and procedures and employing expert teams dedicated to safeguarding data. By leveraging the tools and best practices offered by cloud providers, businesses can create a secure environment for their data, benefiting from the shared expertise and mutual motivation to prevent security breaches. In contrast, managing security in an on-premises data center is solely the responsibility of the company, which may lack the specialized knowledge and resources available in the cloud. This partnership with cloud providers offers a compelling option for businesses seeking to enhance data security without solely relying on internal capabilities.

New Relic has developed mobile apps for iOS and Android that provide easy access to system performance data and alerts, even when users are away from their computers. The apps allow users to favorite critical applications, diagnose issues on-the-go, and share custom dashboards with others. With push notifications, users can receive alerts and quickly investigate incidents. The Insights app enables users to query and share dashboards, making it easy to communicate performance data to stakeholders or teammates. By leveraging these mobile apps, developers can stay on top of their system's performance and respond quickly to issues, even when they're not at their desk.

New Relic's mobile apps for iOS and Android are designed to provide DevOps and engineering teams with easy access to critical information and alerts, even when away from their computers, enabling them to monitor system performance and diagnose issues promptly. Users can favorite essential applications to quickly access them during emergencies and leverage push notifications to prioritize incidents by severity. The apps allow users to investigate alerts through detailed charts and communicate findings with their teams via collaboration tools like Slack. Additionally, the New Relic Insights app enables users to query and share dashboards directly from their phones, facilitating quick responses to data requests without a laptop. These mobile solutions empower developers to maintain oversight of applications and share insights seamlessly, enhancing their ability to manage and resolve issues efficiently.

At iCIMS, a talent cloud company that focuses solely on getting recruitment right, user experience is paramount. The company uses New Relic to deliver on its promise of delivering the best customer experience, with over 4,000 global customers and more than 75 million job applications processed annually. To instrument everything for better insights, iCIMS instruments each customer as a separate application and monitors unique views or journeys for individual customers. This approach allows them to track key performance indicators such as Apdex, which measures user satisfaction, aiming for .9 on a scale of 0-1. The company uses trending New Relic data visualizations to identify areas for performance improvement and has implemented a site reliability engineering (SRE) approach to be proactive in addressing issues before they become incidents. With over 20,000 individual apps monitored at any time, iCIMS relies on New Relic's capabilities to stay ahead of changes in the recruiting software industry, which is evolving with new technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. By committing to customer experience and using New Relic effectively, iCIMS delivers a positive impression of its customers' brands and retains customers.

iCIMS, a leading talent cloud company, prioritizes user experience in its recruitment platform by leveraging New Relic to monitor and enhance performance. With over 4,000 global customers, including nearly 30% of the Fortune 100, iCIMS processes more than 75 million job applications annually and maintains a vast partner ecosystem. The company uniquely instruments each customer and their interactions as isolated applications, allowing for detailed monitoring and a focus on delivering personalized experiences. This approach is reinforced by tracking key performance indicators like Apdex scores, which are critical for customer retention and business growth. iCIMS also implements a proactive site reliability engineering strategy, analyzing New Relic data to preemptively address performance issues. The company has adapted to technological advances in recruitment, integrating new technologies and acquisitions seamlessly with New Relic's support, to continue offering a competitive, modern recruitment experience.

New Relic One now integrates results from all synthetic monitor types, enabling reliability teams to detect incidents faster, isolate causes, and remedy problems more quickly by connecting data from customer-facing endpoints to underlying health of backend services and infrastructure. This integration provides a centralized location for users to troubleshoot incidents with immediate context into availability, functionality, and performance, streamlining incident remediation. The relaunched Synthetics customer experience offers quicker context to help troubleshoot issues across uptime, functionality, and performance, leveraging the new UI and entity search features. Synthetic monitors provide various types of data, including basic uptime, performance of single URLs, user pathways and funnels, and API health, allowing teams to proactively identify and resolve issues through distributed systems.

New Relic has enhanced its New Relic One platform by integrating results from all synthetic monitor types to improve service reliability and incident management for reliability teams. This integration allows users to more effectively troubleshoot incidents by linking data from customer-facing endpoints to the backend services and infrastructure, providing immediate context into availability, functionality, and performance. The new Synthetics customer experience features a user interface that aids in quickly identifying issues across uptime, functionality, and performance, with monitors such as ping monitors, simple browser monitors, scripted browser monitors, and API tests offering detailed insights into website and API performance. This proactive monitoring acts as an insurance policy by simulating end-user interactions to catch problems before they impact customers, thus streamlining the path to incident remediation and improving the overall deployment process by identifying issues before going live.

Matson, Inc., a 138-year-old shipping carrier, successfully migrated to AWS cloud in 2015 and later adopted serverless computing with AWS Lambda functions, achieving significant cost savings and real-time observability. The company integrated AWS Lambda with Amazon API Gateway, DynamoDB, and CloudWatch for a scalable mobile application with reduced infrastructure costs. They utilized the Serverless Framework for resource orchestration and automation, enabling a fully-automated deployment pipeline using AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild. With this adoption, Matson aims to explore serverless-first approaches in other areas of their enterprise, capitalizing on emerging trends in enterprise IT adoption.

Matson, Inc., a major U.S. shipping carrier, successfully migrated its systems to a modern Java stack and transitioned operations to AWS, setting the stage for further innovation and digital transformation. The company explored serverless computing, starting with AWS Lambda functions, to automate the scheduling of Amazon EC2 instances, resulting in cost savings and a shift towards serverless architecture. This transition enabled the development of a flagship mobile application for global container tracking using Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and DynamoDB, ensuring scalability and high availability. Observability was enhanced through tools like New Relic and Amazon CloudWatch, providing real-time monitoring and alerts. Resource orchestration was managed using the Serverless Framework and AWS CloudFormation, while deployment was automated with AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild. The mobile product team is now expanding serverless solutions to support IoT initiatives and other enterprise areas, with a focus on a "serverless-first" approach. Dave Townsend, the Principal Software Engineer at Matson, highlights the enterprise potential of serverless technology, suggesting it is poised for significant growth.

The text discusses New Relic Flex, an application-agnostic tool that allows users to collect metric data from a wide variety of services without requiring dedicated integrations. It provides a curated approach for popular services and applications, but also offers a more flexible option for custom applications through the use of Flex functions, which can perform various tasks on the collected data, such as math operations, filtering, and regular expression extraction. The tool is designed to be easy to use and configure, with example configurations provided for integrating it with popular services like LibreNMS and Linux command-line utilities. With Flex, users can instrument any application that exposes metric data in some way, making it a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing software applications.

The digital customer experience (DCX) refers to the collective impression customers have when interacting with a company's website, mobile app, or other digital touchpoint. Monitoring DCX is crucial as it can impact revenue, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation. A great digital customer experience has three main dimensions: availability, functionality, and speed. To measure these dimensions, one needs to track various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as user throughput, frontend error rates, backend response time, and application transaction times. Understanding the underlying technology metrics that feed into these dimensions is also essential for identifying potential issues before they affect customers. By monitoring DCX, development and operations teams can find and solve problems anywhere in the stack, ultimately delivering a better customer experience and impacting business success.

Software's ubiquity is underscored by the vast number of custom applications running globally, and New Relic aims to facilitate their monitoring through its extensive range of integrations. While New Relic offers tailored integrations for popular services, it acknowledges the impossibility of creating bespoke integrations for every custom application, leading to the introduction of New Relic Flex. Flex is an application-agnostic tool that collects metric data from various services, processing any input into metric data for New Relic Infrastructure. Users can configure Flex through YAML files, allowing for flexible instrumentation of any application that exposes metric data, such as sending JSON over HTTP or using standard output in shell sessions. The tool's versatility is demonstrated through examples, like integrating LibreNMS and monitoring Linux filesystem sizes, showcasing Flex's capability to combine data with other telemetry data in New Relic One. With a growing community and open-source contributions, Flex offers endless possibilities for application monitoring, encouraging innovation and collaboration within the New Relic ecosystem.

In an increasingly digital world, the digital customer experience (DCX) is becoming the primary way businesses interact with customers and prospects, making it crucial to understand its components and key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure service quality. DCX encompasses every interaction a customer has with digital touchpoints like websites and mobile apps, impacting revenue, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation. To maintain high-quality DCX, businesses must monitor three core dimensions—availability, functionality, and speed—across various contexts, such as video streaming services, mobile food-ordering apps, and enterprise web applications. Identifying and analyzing underlying technology metrics, such as frontend and backend error rates and response times, help teams troubleshoot issues that could degrade the digital experience. By prioritizing metrics that directly affect users, companies can better manage their digital services and preemptively address potential problems, ultimately enhancing the customer experience and supporting business success.

There are limits to any system, and when these limits are exceeded, unexpected behaviors can occur, leading to services degradation and outages. To plan for macro-level issues like saturation, long latency, and excessive workloads, SRE and DevOps teams can design for graceful degradation of services, allowing for more limited functionality while avoiding catastrophic failure. This can be achieved through shedding workload, time shifting workloads, reducing quality of service, or adding more capacity to the system. By considering these strategies and designing for resiliency, teams can create more resilient services that can handle spikes in workloads without affecting uptime, ultimately preparing for the inevitable and unexpected patterns in their systems.

Systems can experience unexpected behaviors when pushed beyond their limits, leading to service degradation and outages, often without a singular root cause. To mitigate such issues, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams should plan for macro-level problems like saturation and excessive workloads by designing systems for resiliency and graceful degradation. This can involve strategies such as shedding workload, time-shifting workloads, reducing the quality of service, or adding more capacity, with each method offering unique advantages and considerations. Load shedding involves dropping lower-priority requests to manage excessive demand, while time-shifting decouples request generation from processing, allowing asynchronous handling through message queues. Reducing the quality of service can alleviate system stress by offering limited functionality, and adding capacity through autoscaling is ideal but requires sufficient resources. Advanced capacity planning and proactive monitoring are crucial for building resilient systems that maintain uptime by managing workload patterns and complex failure modes effectively.

New Relic Applied Intelligence (AI) is an AIOps solution that helps on-call teams detect, diagnose and respond to incidents faster by providing a centralized, intelligent feed of incident information. It combines the value of an intelligent system with minimal configuration requirements, integrating with various tools and data sources via its REST API. New Relic AI provides automatic anomaly detection, reduces alert noise and fatigue, and offers transparency, trust, and control through its correlation engine and customization options. The solution accelerates incident response by providing context about existing issues, suggesting responders, and delivering relevant insights to teams' existing workflows and tools.

New Relic Applied Intelligence (AI) is an AIOps solution designed to help DevOps, SRE, and network operation center teams manage the complexities of modern software systems by detecting, diagnosing, and responding to incidents more efficiently. It reduces alert fatigue by intelligently correlating and prioritizing incident data, using machine learning to adapt and improve over time. The platform is source and data agnostic, integrating seamlessly with existing tools like PagerDuty, Slack, and Amazon CloudWatch, allowing teams to maintain their current workflows. New Relic AI offers features such as automatic anomaly detection and incident intelligence, which enhance operational visibility and reduce noise from irrelevant alerts, thereby helping teams focus on critical issues. With minimal configuration required, it aims to shift teams from reactive to proactive incident management, ultimately improving software reliability and performance.

New Relic has enhanced its Query Language (NRQL) to improve user experience and query capabilities, particularly with the introduction of wildcards that allow for easier querying and charting of multiple metrics together, eliminating the need to manually add individual metrics. The new NRQL also handles null, empty strings, empty sets, and NaN values more accurately, providing expected results in queries. These updates aim to make it faster and easier for users to explore their telemetry data and make informed decisions with New Relic dashboards and analytics.

Recent enhancements to the New Relic Query Language (NRQL) now allow for more powerful data exploration within the New Relic Database (NRDB), making it easier for users to handle telemetry data efficiently. The introduction of wildcards simplifies the process of querying and charting multiple metrics, eliminating the need to manually update dashboards and queries when new metrics are added. Additionally, NRQL now accurately distinguishes between null values, empty strings, and empty sets, ensuring more reliable query results. This update allows users to better utilize "tags" in their data and correctly returns 'NaN' for the minimum, maximum, or average of empty sets, rather than '0', thus providing more accurate insights from the data. These improvements aim to enhance data analysis and decision-making processes for New Relic users.

Developers are critical to the success of modern businesses as they create software that drives business growth and customer experiences. However, many executives outside of IT remain clueless about how to create an environment where developers thrive. To address this, a starter kit is provided which highlights key points such as recognizing developers as engineers and artists who require freedom to dream up solutions and take ownership of their work, measuring success through technical metrics rather than business metrics, engaging with the business to understand its goals and challenges, utilizing modern technology infrastructure to attract top talent, fostering entrepreneurship among developers by giving them responsibility for developing business skills, and recognizing and celebrating their achievements. By adopting these strategies, business leaders can create a positive environment that encourages developers to be creative, productive, and loyal, ultimately driving business success.

In today's tech-driven world, organizations increasingly rely on software and developers to maintain efficient operations and customer-facing services. Developers, essential yet often misunderstood by non-technical executives, are both engineers and artists who devise solutions to complex business challenges, ensuring applications run seamlessly and are continuously improved. Their success is measured through technical metrics like reliability and innovation rather than conventional business outcomes. To truly harness their potential, developers should be engaged with business objectives, provided with modern technological tools, and recognized for their contributions, as this fosters motivation, creativity, and loyalty. Moreover, many developers harbor entrepreneurial aspirations, and by supporting their development of business acumen, organizations can benefit from their energy and creativity. Celebrating developers' achievements publicly can also reinforce their critical role in driving business success.

The article highlights three financial technology (FinTech) firms - Cellulant, Banco de Crédito e Inversiones, and ZestMoney - that are using technology to disrupt markets and bring banking and credit services to the underserved masses. These companies have taken their operations to the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has enabled them to scale rapidly and efficiently. New Relic monitoring is also being used by all three firms to provide visibility into their services, ensure constant availability, and optimize performance. The use of New Relic has resulted in significant benefits for each company, including reduced infrastructure costs, faster issue resolution, and increased innovation.

Access to banking and credit services remains a significant challenge in many parts of the world, with FinTech companies like Cellulant, Banco de Crédito e Inversiones (BCI), and ZestMoney working to address this issue using innovative technology. Cellulant, based in Africa, developed a digital payment platform called Tingg, which became the continent's first super-app, facilitating smoother transactions through AWS cloud solutions and New Relic monitoring. BCI in Chile launched MACH, a prepaid card service operating on a cloud-native platform that rapidly scaled to accommodate millions of users, thanks to effective monitoring and management tools. In India, ZestMoney provides easy credit access through its automated system, supported by AWS and New Relic to ensure an optimized and reliable service for millions of users, including partnerships to extend its reach. All three companies leverage cloud technology and monitoring tools to improve performance, increase customer reach, and enhance the reliability of financial services for underserved populations.

Building an observability system that provides accurate alerts with a high signal-to-noise ratio can be overwhelming, especially when maintaining configurations across a large organization. To address this challenge, software teams are adopting the practice of "observability as code," which treats observability ecosystem configurations as code and automates their management through infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform. The New Relic Terraform provider allows teams to define and provision their New Relic resources in a declarative language called HCL, enabling them to create monitoring and alerting configurations that can be easily managed and updated through automation. By using Terraform and the New Relic provider, teams can define alert policies based on four golden signals of monitoring (latency, traffic, errors, and saturation) and link them to notification channels, making it easier to manage their observability system in a scalable and maintainable way.

Observability is crucial for managing modern complex architectures, but creating an effective system with a high signal-to-noise ratio can be challenging. The concept of "observability as code," where configurations are automated and managed like code, is recommended to minimize human error, supported by the integration of tools like Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This approach is exemplified using the New Relic Terraform provider to establish monitoring and alerting configurations based on the four golden signals of monitoring: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. The process involves setting up alert policies and conditions for a sample application, linking them to notification channels such as PagerDuty, and storing configurations in a version-controlled repository, facilitating collaboration and continuous improvement. The blog also emphasizes the importance of maintaining these configurations in a repository and suggests automating them through CI/CD pipelines to enhance efficiency and reliability.

At New Relic, staying connected is a core value that has been particularly important during the current challenging times when team members are physically apart from each other. The company has been working hard to maintain connections through various creative ways such as virtual coffee chats and meditation sessions, even getting creative with tools like Snap Camera for fun filters and Domino's Pizza mobile app ordering. Many employees have found innovative ways to stay productive while spending more time with their families, including setting up home workstations that double as play areas or enjoying the outdoors. The company encourages its readers to share their own experiences working from home by posting pet pics and workstations on social media using the @newrelic hashtag.

New Relic emphasizes maintaining connections among its team members despite the challenges posed by physical separation, fostering a sense of community through virtual activities like coffee chats, happy hours, and meditation sessions. These initiatives not only help alleviate feelings of isolation but also offer glimpses into colleagues' personal lives, enhancing relationships and camaraderie. The Brand and Creative team has introduced creative interactions using Snap Camera for fun video chats, while other teams, like the Relics of Color Affinity Group, organized virtual gatherings such as happy hours. Further demonstrating their commitment to staying connected, New Relic's Sydney-based employees enjoyed a virtual pizza party courtesy of their leader, Dmitri Chen, and various employees are adapting to working from home with unique setups that include family and pets. Virginette Acacio, the blog's author, encourages readers to share their own remote work experiences and setups, highlighting the collective effort to remain positive and productive during these uncertain times.

The New Relic Developer Champion Program is an initiative that invites developers currently using New Relic One to be selected as experts in the platform's developer community. The program aims to increase engagement with its users and provide them with unique access to resources, product teams, early access to new features and products, and recognition within the community. To participate, developers must apply through a nomination process and agree to make good-faith agreements to share their work and expertise with others. Selected Developer Champions will be granted access to exclusive venues and activities, including the ability to provide direct feedback to product teams and deliver conference talks or meetups based on observability platform themes. The program is designed to support the community by identifying trends and methods for solving challenges in the industry using the New Relic platform.

New Relic launched the New Relic Developer Champion Program, aiming to strengthen its developer community engagement by inviting developers using New Relic One to participate in a one-year exclusive role as Developer Champions. These champions are selected through a nomination process and are expected to engage with the community, share their expertise, and contribute to the development and enhancement of New Relic products. They will have access to New Relic's Developer Advocacy team and product teams, early access to new features, and opportunities for recognition within the community. The program requires a one-year commitment, with the possibility of extending for an additional year based on performance, and focuses on fostering transparency, problem-solving, and creativity among its participants.