May 2020 Summaries

The New Relic Roku Agent is an open-source tool that allows developers to monitor and analyze performance metrics for their Roku channels, enabling them to ensure exceptional viewer experiences and drive customer satisfaction engagement. The agent captures device and channel metrics, HTTP request details, and video quality of experience (QoE) events, providing insights into system- and video-level events. By using the agent, developers can identify and remediate quality and performance problems, track improvements from build to build, and optimize backend API and CDN configurations to improve viewer experience. The agent is designed for use with New Relic One, a comprehensive observability platform that provides additional features such as dashboards, queries, and APIs for custom attribute instrumentation. By integrating the Roku Agent with New Relic One, developers can gain a balanced view of their streaming architecture's performance, including QoE metrics compared to web, mobile, and other devices.

Andy Wetzel, a Senior Director at New Relic, discusses the increasing expectations for video streaming quality and the potential for viewer churn due to poor performance. To address these challenges on the popular Roku platform, New Relic has developed an open-source agent that captures and analyzes metrics related to device and channel performance, HTTP requests, and video quality of experience. This tool aims to help product owners, API managers, and developers optimize Roku channel performance and improve viewer engagement by integrating telemetry data with broader observability platforms. The post provides detailed instructions for setting up the New Relic Roku Agent and utilizing its features to monitor both system- and video-level events. It also highlights the importance of comprehensive observability for streaming architectures and encourages contributions to the open-source project.

The author of this text is a member of Sainsbury's team responsible for ensuring service stability and customer experience through site reliability engineering (SRE). They developed an app called Twitter Alerts to track social media signals, such as tweets mentioning issues with the company's services, and correlate them with systems that may be alerting. This allows the team to quickly identify problems and resolve them before they impact customers. The app uses a simple Python script to stream data from Twitter, pattern match it to certain keywords, and then fire it into New Relic as event data. The author also customized the visualization of the data in the app, including using responsive design for mobile viewing, and established alert policies on issues identified by customers through Twitter. The Twitter Alerts app has provided immediate visibility into customer experience and has helped the team to identify and resolve issues quickly, giving them confidence that customers are not having any issues.

Sainsbury’s, a leading UK retailer, implemented a site reliability engineering approach to enhance its online grocery service, focusing on customer experience from order to delivery. To improve service stability, the engineering team developed a custom app called Twitter Alerts using the New Relic platform, which integrates social media signals with system alerts to rapidly identify and address customer issues. This app, created with a simple Python script and the Twitter API, detects and matches keywords in tweets related to Sainsbury’s services and sends the data to New Relic for real-time monitoring and alerting. The effort, which took three days, allows for immediate issue detection, resolution, and the fine-tuning of alert policies, especially crucial during peak shopping periods like the Christmas season. This initiative has led to faster insights into customer experiences, enhancing the ability to prevent future disruptions and ensuring a positive experience for customers. Furthermore, the success of this app has prompted the team to explore additional applications using New Relic's programmable platform to better visualize and utilize data across services.

The Serverless Framework is a well-established leader in serverless tools, offering a comprehensive feature that supports multiple cloud vendors, including AWS Lambda, and has a growing plugin ecosystem. It provides cost efficiency, automatic scaling, no server management overhead, event-driven architecture, fast deployment, automatic high availability, microservices architecture, resource efficiency, easy integration with other services, reduced development time, and more. For Python developers, the Serverless Framework is a great starting point, but may require some additional setup due to its Node.js implementation. The framework abstracts away much of the complexity of serverless computing, making it easier for developers to focus on writing code and less on managing infrastructure. With the Serverless Framework, developers can create serverless functions in Python that are triggered by events, such as HTTP requests or schedule-based triggers, and return JSON serializable output. The framework also provides support for web APIs, allowing developers to create RESTful APIs with ease.

Serverless computing, particularly with Python, has gained momentum with the rise of platforms like AWS Lambda, which offer benefits such as cost efficiency, automatic scaling, and reduced server management overhead. The Serverless Framework, despite being written in Node.js, provides an accessible entry point for Python developers to build serverless applications by abstracting infrastructure concerns. The blog post guides through setting up and deploying a simple "hello world" function using the Serverless Framework, highlights the importance of using Python 3.x for new projects, and discusses the nuances of choosing between web APIs and worker functions. It also explains how to handle dependencies and deployment issues, particularly when dealing with libraries like 'requests', by leveraging plugins like 'serverless-python-requirements'. Furthermore, it explores the practical applications of serverless functions, such as creating scheduled tasks and web APIs, while emphasizing the importance of event-driven architecture and the potential for integration with other cloud services.

New Relic has released three new features for its logging solution: Live Tail, Log Forwarding from the Infrastructure agent, and Logs in Context. These features aim to simplify log management and improve troubleshooting efficiency by providing real-time log data streaming, eliminating the need for manual log forwarders, and correlating logs with infrastructure metrics and other data sources to provide a complete picture of the environment.

New Relic has introduced three new features to enhance its cloud-based logging solution, aiming to alleviate the challenges faced by system admins, DevOps engineers, and developers in managing complex software stacks. These features include a live tail for logs, which allows users to stream log data in real-time, enabling immediate observation of system responses to changes; log forwarding from the New Relic Infrastructure agent, which simplifies log management by eliminating the need for a separate log forwarder and accelerates issue resolution; and infrastructure monitoring in context, providing a comprehensive view by integrating logs with data from New Relic's other components like APM and Kubernetes, facilitating deeper analysis through enriched contextual attributes. These advancements are designed to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and enhance observability, allowing quicker detection and troubleshooting of infrastructure issues.

The author of this text is conducting video interviews for job openings at New Relic due to COVID-19 restrictions, and has found that it requires adjustments in communication and interview style. To alleviate stress and uncertainty for both the interviewer and candidate, the author shares best practices for remote video interviewing, including clear introductions, acknowledging the unusual circumstances, disclosing personal setup, revealing potential pitfalls, scheduling buffer time, and providing full disclosure of technical issues. By being open and honest about the challenges of remote interviews, the author aims to put candidates at ease and reduce pressure, ultimately creating a more comfortable and effective interview experience for all parties involved.

In the context of remote hiring at New Relic due to COVID-19, Jen Hammond, an engineering manager, shares her experiences and best practices for conducting virtual interviews. She highlights the challenges of adjusting to video interviews, such as the lack of body language and potential technical issues, and provides strategies to ease the process for both interviewers and candidates. These strategies include clear introductions, acknowledging the unusual circumstances, sharing details about the interview setup, preemptively addressing possible technical pitfalls, and allowing buffer time for candidates to ask questions. Hammond emphasizes transparency and empathy to make candidates more comfortable during what may be their first video interview experience, and she encourages job seekers to consider opportunities at New Relic despite the ongoing remote interview process.

The New Relic Partner Network (NRPN) is a refreshed partner program designed for ease of engagement with a solutions-based platform approach and flexible business models. It includes four partner categories: Technology Partners, Solution Providers, Consulting Partners, and Managed Service Providers, with two program levels: Select and Premier. The NRPN aims to deliver best-in-breed solutions, a more comprehensive "better together" offering, and new go-to-market opportunities for partners. New Relic has introduced several technology partners, including Cequence Security, FullStory, Lacework, LoadRunner, Split, Fastly, Blameless, Harness, and GitHub, with integrations that enhance observability, security, DevOps, and customer experience. The NRPN enables New Relic and its participating technology partners to work together to solve complex problems for customers, driving innovation and value through joint solutions.

In April, New Relic launched the New Relic Partner Network (NRPN), a revitalized partner program aimed at fostering collaboration through a solutions-based platform and adaptable business models. The program features four partner categories—Technology Partners, Solution Providers, Consulting Partners, and Managed Service Providers—and operates on two levels, Select and Premier, allowing for frequent evaluation and advancement based on business performance metrics. With over 200 integrations, New Relic emphasizes the value of collaborative efforts, introducing technology partners like Atlassian, PagerDuty, MongoDB, and Hashicorp to deliver comprehensive solutions and new market opportunities. The NRPN aims to enhance customer success by integrating partner solutions with New Relic’s platform, improving visibility and context in complex systems, and addressing diverse challenges such as DevOps, digital customer experience, cloud optimization, and cybersecurity. The initiative underscores the importance of a joint approach to technology challenges, enabling partners to extend New Relic’s capabilities and increase value for mutual customers, while the platform’s Developer Edition simplifies integration and application development.

New Relic has adapted its summer internship program to accommodate the challenges posed by COVID-19, shifting from traditional on-site internships to remote ones starting May 18. The program will provide 28 interns with a 12-week experience, shipping computers and offering a stipend for Wi-Fi or home office setup. Interns will report to various departments, attend virtual roundtable discussions, and engage in cross-functional training. To ensure success, New Relic emphasizes the importance of communication, preparing accordingly for intern needs, and maintaining engagement through creative activities. The company is committed to supporting students and developing talent to build a more perfect internet.

As a monitoring practitioner with decades of experience, Josh Biggley is on a mission to improve observability in SolarWinds Orion by shifting from traditional monitoring practices to a more comprehensive approach that enables teams to ask questions they didn't know they needed to ask. Observability is about asking questions that you don't know upfront about your system, empowering teams to see where and why problems exist, rather than just measuring what's important in advance. Josh identifies five key areas for improvement: democratizing access to data, consolidating metrics, events, logs, and traces into a single platform, layering data from multiple sources to infer the state of an environment, and asking three questions - "What can I save?", "What can I gain?", and "What can I create?" - to drive real returns to business. By unifying data from SolarWinds Orion and New Relic, administrators can level up their observability game, enabling faster time-to-glass for data and unlocking insights and innovation across the enterprise.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, New Relic adapted its summer internship program to a remote model, beginning May 18 and June 22, with 28 interns across the United States and one in Japan engaging in a 12-week program through its Phoenix, San Francisco, and Portland offices. The company is committed to providing a comprehensive learning experience, where interns will gain exposure to various departments, including sales, marketing, engineering, and analytics, while also becoming proficient in remote-working tools like BlueJeans and Slack. To support interns, New Relic is sending computers and offering a $150 stipend for home office setup, emphasizing the importance of communication and preparation to ensure a successful remote internship experience. The initiative aims to maintain high engagement through creative virtual activities and meet academic requirements for students, reflecting New Relic's dedication to developing talent that contributes to internet innovation.

Monitoring and observability are distinct yet interrelated concepts where monitoring involves measuring predefined metrics, while observability enables asking unforeseen questions to understand systemic issues better. Experienced monitoring practitioner Josh Biggley highlights the transition from traditional monitoring to improved observability, emphasizing data democratization, real-time data collection, and consolidating data into a single platform to enhance insights and decision-making across enterprises. By leveraging platforms like New Relic, professionals can unify telemetry data, reduce operational costs, and improve mean time to detect and resolve issues, ultimately driving customer satisfaction and business innovation. This approach not only simplifies troubleshooting but also fosters a collaborative environment where data can be shared and leveraged across teams to identify and address problems more effectively.

Monitoring Hyper-V with New Relic provides a scalable and flexible way to analyze key metrics from virtual machines. The process involves installing the New Relic infrastructure agent on each node in the Hyper-V cluster, configuring the `config.json` file to specify which performance counters to collect, and visualizing the data using New Relic One dashboards. By integrating with WMI, New Relic can gather a wide range of metrics, including memory performance, storage performance, network performance, and CPU utilization, providing context to Hyper-V metric data when combined with other data in the platform. The solution is open and allows for customization, enabling users to build their own dashboards and applications to fit their unique needs.

Microsoft Hyper-V is a widely used virtualization tool among Windows administrators, facilitating the creation and management of virtual machines and supporting multiple operating systems. It is instrumental in building public, private, and hybrid clouds and offers features like failover clusters for redundancy. The blog post describes how to monitor Hyper-V using New Relic Infrastructure and its on-host integration (OHI) by leveraging Windows performance counters and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to track key metrics. The integration involves installing the New Relic infrastructure agent and customizing configuration files to collect data from Hyper-V environments, which can then be visualized through New Relic dashboards. Additionally, the post highlights the flexibility and openness of the New Relic WMI OHI, which allows users to incorporate any necessary Hyper-V metrics into their data sets for further analysis and visualization.

New Relic has released a feature that allows users to automatically deploy synthetic private locations and run monitors alongside Kubernetes deployments, enabling automated testing and monitoring of critical endpoints in rapidly-scaling environments. This new feature, called New Relic Synthetics, is designed to meet customers where they are - within their existing systems and workflows. By integrating with Kubernetes, developers can save time and reduce manual efforts, while also gaining additional visibility into the health and status of their private locations. The feature allows users to easily deploy a new version of their application alongside APM and Synthetics, and automatically redeploy them if issues arise during deployment. New Relic Synthetics is now compatible with Kubernetes orchestration software, making it easier for teams to proactively detect and resolve incidents faster by finding problems before they impact customers.

New Relic has introduced a new feature that integrates its Synthetics monitoring tool with Kubernetes environments, allowing users to automate and manage application deployment and monitoring processes more efficiently. By utilizing containerized private minions, developers can incorporate uptime monitoring directly into their Kubernetes deployments, streamlining the process of ensuring critical endpoints remain available and performant. This integration makes use of Helm charts to facilitate the deployment and management of private locations within Kubernetes, enabling automatic redeployment of Synthetics alongside application updates without additional configuration. The New Relic Kubernetes cluster explorer provides enhanced visibility into the health and performance of private locations and other containers within the cluster, helping teams to proactively detect and resolve issues. This approach offers an automated solution to monitor application availability and performance, thereby reducing manual efforts and improving system reliability in rapidly scaling environments.

Climate Corporation, a farming technology company, is leveraging data to help farmers improve their yields and make informed decisions about crop performance. Their solution, Climate FieldView, enables farmers to collect and measure field data in real-time, providing insights into soil composition, seed type, and expected production. The company built its application on microservices in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and initially used two monitoring tools: New Relic APM 360 and open-source Prometheus. However, as the business grew, they decided to standardize on New Relic for scalability and ease of use. By instrumenting their services with New Relic's agents, Climate Corporation can monitor their applications more efficiently, track performance issues, and reduce monitoring complexity, allowing developers to focus on developing new features instead. This partnership has enabled the company to deliver DevOps at scale and improve overall efficiency.

The text discusses the integration of Split, a feature delivery platform, with New Relic, a monitoring and analytics tool, to enable developers to track the impact of code changes on application performance. The integration uses feature flags to "safely activate or deactivate features" for experimentation, release, testing, operations, and more. By annotating New Relic transactions with feature flag context, developers can correlate application metrics with feature flag changes, providing deeper insights into the effectiveness of their feature releases. With this integration, developers can use New Relic's distributed tracing and NRQL query capabilities to analyze feature flag data, creating custom dashboards and applications to visualize the impact of code changes on user experience.

Feature flags play a crucial role in managing software development, allowing teams to toggle features on or off during beta, early access, and limited releases before reaching general availability, and Split is a platform that facilitates this process by enabling developers to safely experiment and release features. Split's integration with New Relic enhances this capability by providing developers with immediate visibility into the impact of code changes through feature flags, allowing for more detailed analysis of application performance and user experience. By leveraging the Split Java SDK and New Relic's monitoring tools, developers can append feature flag data to transaction-level information, enabling them to track customer experiences and changes in application performance with precise detail. This integration empowers teams to effectively visualize data, create custom dashboards, and make informed decisions about feature rollouts, ultimately aiming to simplify the feature management process and improve software observability.

Climate Corporation, a digital agriculture company, leverages data-driven solutions to help farmers optimize crop yields through its Climate FieldView platform, which collects and visualizes field data to support critical agricultural decisions. The platform is built on microservices within Amazon Web Services (AWS) and has expanded from a U.S. startup to a global enterprise, necessitating scalable monitoring solutions to ensure consistent service performance. Initially using both New Relic APM 360 and open-source Prometheus for monitoring, Climate Corporation eventually standardized on New Relic, valuing its comprehensive observability tools and ease of integration. This transition allows developers to focus on their core tasks by automating monitoring processes and utilizing features like distributed tracing to maintain efficient service delivery, such as the timely distribution of satellite imagery to farmers. The partnership with New Relic has enabled Climate Corporation to advance its DevOps capabilities, reducing monitoring complexities and allowing developers more time to innovate and enhance their offerings.

New Relic has released an Ansible role that allows for seamless deployment, configuration, and updating of its Java agent on popular application servers and frameworks like Apache Tomcat, Eclipse Jetty, WildFly, and Spring Boot. The role provides a standardized file-and-directory structure, enabling automation of tasks such as provisioning containers or VMs, deploying monitoring agents alongside the application code, and providing automatic backups of configuration files. To use this role, users need to download and install it through the Ansible Galaxy CLI, create a playbook and inventory file, and execute their playbook using the `ansible-playbook` command. The role is an open source contribution under the Apache 2.0 license and welcomes requests for improvements.

Enterprise companies using modern distributed architectures often employ automation tools like Ansible to manage deployments efficiently, especially at scale. New Relic has introduced an Ansible role available on Ansible Galaxy, which facilitates the deployment, configuration, and updating of New Relic Java agents on various application servers such as Apache Tomcat, Eclipse Jetty, WildFly, and Spring Boot. Ansible roles help streamline configuration management by grouping related tasks and their dependencies into self-contained units, promoting modularity and reusability. The New Relic Ansible role can be imported via the Ansible Galaxy CLI and supports various configuration paths, allowing users to update agents across host groups and create backups of existing configurations. Additionally, New Relic emphasizes its commitment to open source, with the Ansible role contributing under the Apache 2.0 license, inviting improvements from the community while supporting broader integration and monitoring efforts, such as OpenTelemetry.

New Relic has achieved the AWS Lambda Ready designation, recognizing its successful integration with AWS Lambda and demonstrating its ability to provide full serverless observability for customers deploying applications on the platform. This achievement differentiates New Relic as an AWS Partner Network member with a product that integrates seamlessly with AWS Lambda. With this designation, developers can expect enhanced monitoring, visualization, and troubleshooting capabilities for their serverless applications, enabling them to function faster and more efficiently. New Relic's latest features also provide improved error analysis and "right-sizing" of AWS Lambda functions, allowing users to optimize their cloud costs and gain deeper insights into application performance. By integrating with AWS Lambda, New Relic enables developers to build software and deploy it to production with increased agility, scalability, and efficiency.

Measuring performance metrics in React Native apps can be challenging due to the framework's limitations. However, with custom instrumentation using tools like New Relic, developers can gather valuable insights into their app's speed and responsiveness. The author of this article shares their experience in measuring component load time, user session time, and user interaction in a React Native app using class components and functional components. They provide examples of how to implement performance metrics such as recordBreadcrumb(), capturing class component load time, recording app launch count, calculating user session time, and capturing user interaction in both class and functional components. The article concludes that with forethought and planning, developers can accomplish many basic performance metrics using just the recordBreadcrumb() instrumentation, and provides a unique perspective across their entire system.

Serverless architecture has become increasingly popular for its agility, scalability, and efficiency, but it presents challenges in debugging and monitoring applications. New Relic Serverless addresses these challenges by offering developers tools to monitor, visualize, troubleshoot, and alert on their applications within a unified experience, facilitating faster function development. Recently, New Relic achieved the AWS Lambda Ready designation, highlighting its successful integration with AWS Lambda and its status as a reliable AWS Partner Network member. This partnership allows AWS customers to evaluate and use New Relic's technology effectively. New Relic has enhanced its serverless monitoring features to provide detailed insights into invocation errors, memory usage, and function performance, enabling developers to optimize their AWS Lambda functions and potentially reduce costs. Users can now filter and analyze metrics by specific versions or aliases, allowing for precise monitoring across various development stages. This capability is particularly important for identifying production anomalies that might not have surfaced during testing.

React Native offers potential for high performance in app development, but it lacks built-in tools for measuring app speed, requiring developers to optimize performance manually. This text explores how to measure performance through component load time, user session duration, app launch count, and user interactions using New Relic's React Native agent. Initially focusing on class components and then transitioning to functional components, the author demonstrates capturing these metrics by using lifecycle methods and hooks like `useEffect` for functional components. The process involves creating custom instrumentation to monitor performance metrics, ultimately aiming to enhance user experience by identifying areas for improvement. The article concludes by noting the positive outcomes of implementing these strategies, encouraging developers to further explore performance monitoring in React Native applications.

New Relic Edge with Infinite Tracing offers unparalleled visibility into distributed systems while eliminating operational burdens of complex on-premises tracing software. It provides 100% observation of all application traces and visualizations for actionable data, without the need to manage complex infrastructure or scale on-premises components. This service is fully managed, cloud-native, and scalable, allowing developers to focus on high-value efforts while minimizing costs with lower egress charges due to its location in the same region as workloads. It supports open instrumentation and vendor-neutral instrumentation, providing flexibility for software teams to choose the right tools for their needs.

New Relic has introduced New Relic Edge with Infinite Tracing, a cloud-native service designed to enhance distributed tracing by observing 100% of application traces, thereby offering greater visibility and scalability without the complexities of on-premises software. This fully managed service is tailored for modern microservices-based applications, enabling developers to efficiently manage interconnected distributed systems while minimizing operational burdens and costs associated with data egress. By supporting open, vendor-neutral instrumentation, New Relic provides flexibility for tracing telemetry from various sources, enhancing the ability of DevOps teams to troubleshoot and understand system behavior quickly. The service leverages tail-based sampling to focus on the most critical data, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and ensuring efficient performance monitoring. Additionally, New Relic One integrates tracing telemetry with comprehensive observability tools, offering a unified platform for monitoring and improving software performance across different environments.

New Relic has launched a corporate social responsibility program to help individuals and communities develop creative solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts. The company's New Relic Product Donation and Discount Program provides free access to its platform for 90 days to organizations engaged in public benefit initiatives. Several organizations have taken advantage of this program, including CoronaSafe Network, which aims to support government efforts with a model for centralized capacity planning; Docato, which offers digital services for free to help organizations recover from the crisis; Pand-Aid, an open-source project that aggregates vulnerable population's needs and distributes aid; Race 2 Breathe, which enables hospitals to order 3D-printed PPE and medical equipment locally; and WelTelHealth, which uses two-way SMS communication to improve patient adherence to medication. These organizations are working together with New Relic to support COVID-19 relief efforts and help individuals and communities in need.

New Relic AI's Proactive Detection solution helps DevOps teams avoid issues by proactively detecting and analyzing anomalies using data from New Relic APM. It provides a holistic view of the events leading up to an anomaly, allowing teams to better identify what is happening in their application and environment. The solution automatically analyzes every anomaly, providing context and recent activity for an entity, as well as suggestions for further troubleshooting. Proactive Detection also integrates with New Relic Database (NRDB) and Incident Intelligence, enabling teams to create dashboards and alerts based on anomaly data. The solution is easy to set up and offers a free tier that can be started using in under 10 minutes.

New Relic's Proactive Detection, part of its AIOps solution, aims to streamline incident management by automatically detecting and analyzing anomalies in software systems using data from New Relic APM, thereby reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR). It offers easy setup and integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, providing alerts through Slack and linking to an Analyze page for deeper insights into each anomaly. Recent enhancements include a detailed Analysis page, an Anomaly overview for a comprehensive view of detected issues, integration with the New Relic Database for creating dashboards and alerts, and alignment with New Relic AI Incident Intelligence for context-rich incident management. These features help DevOps teams anticipate problems, reduce alert noise, and quickly resolve issues, supported by the power of AI and machine learning in New Relic AI.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, New Relic has been actively involved in supporting relief efforts through its corporate social responsibility program, NewRelic.org, by expanding its Product Donation and Discount Program. This initiative offers free access to the New Relic One platform for 90 days to new customer organizations engaged in pandemic relief efforts, including nonprofits. Several organizations have leveraged this program, such as CoronaSafe Network in India, which assists government efforts with integrated applications for managing resources; Brazil-based Docato, which aims to streamline business processes during the crisis; Pand-Aid, which aggregates aid for vulnerable populations and tracks COVID-19 symptoms; Race 2 Breathe in France, facilitating local 3D-printed personal protection equipment production; and WelTelHealth, which uses SMS communication to support COVID-19 patients. Erin Dieterich, Senior Director of Social Impact at New Relic, emphasizes the company's commitment to providing equitable access to technology and encourages organizations involved in relief efforts to apply for access to their platform.