July 2020 Summaries

Observability has become a crucial practice for enterprise IT organizations to move from a reactive to a proactive posture, enabling great customer experiences, agility, and profitable growth by delivering sustainable competitive differentiation. To achieve this, IT executives should focus on several core areas including telemetry data, SaaS delivery, pricing predictability and transparency, full-stack observability, analytics, modern interfaces, culture, and business KPIs that drive business outcomes. By adopting observability, IT teams can create an observable environment, provide fast analysis and visualizations to various teams, and deliver business benefits spanning capacity planning, forecasting, performance, and observability-driven backlogs. The goal is to help IT stakeholders make their complex environments observable, enabling them to measure performance and react properly, ultimately driving business value creation.

Over the past 15 years, enterprise IT organizations have transitioned from traditional application performance management to the modern practice of observability, driven by the adoption of cloud architectures, Agile development, and DevOps practices, which have increased complexity and necessitated faster, more integrated solutions. Observability helps organizations shift from reactive to proactive postures, enhancing customer engagement, product innovation, and competitive differentiation through improved customer experiences and agility. Key areas of focus for IT executives include telemetry data, SaaS delivery, pricing transparency, full-stack observability, analytics, user-friendly interfaces, and fostering a data-driven culture. Observability provides critical insights into complex systems, enabling IT teams to measure performance and align technology metrics with business KPIs such as revenue and Net Promoter Score. By creating observable environments and employing roles like observability engineers, organizations can drive efficiencies and deliver high-quality software products more reliably, ultimately benefiting business operations and growth.

The use of open source software is increasingly being adopted in cloud native instrumentation and telemetry, with Gartner predicting that by 2025, 50% of new cloud-native application monitoring will use open-source instrumentation instead of vendor-specific agents. Open-source software is widely used within mission-critical IT workloads, and its usage is expected to grow by 30% compound annual growth rate over the next two years. However, managing multiple data sources from different tools can lead to observability silos, causing challenges in correlating issues across different tools and telemetry types. The Telemetry Data Platform offers a single place for all data, allowing users to consolidate their workflows and simplify observability best practices. It is a fully managed SaaS platform that scales to handle large amounts of time-series metric, event, log, and trace data, providing real-time investigation capabilities with speed and flexibility at unlimited scale. The platform also includes enterprise-grade security, access control, and compliance features, making it an attractive solution for organizations looking to improve their observability practices.

New Relic has reimagined its flagship product, New Relic One, to provide a simplified and intuitive user experience, powerful new capabilities, and simple pricing and packaging. The company listened to customer feedback and addressed common pain points such as tool sprawl, data silos, expensive host-based pricing, and the need for a single source of truth. The reimagined platform offers cost savings, increased engineering productivity, and a streamlined approach to managing modern business demands. New Relic One features a telemetry data platform that makes it easy and affordable to collect operational data, a full-stack observability product that provides troubleshooting tools regardless of where problems occur in systems, and a modern UI platform. The company is also offering a perpetual free tier for small teams and individual developers, providing access to the same powerful tools and platforms as larger companies.

New Relic has introduced a Prometheus remote write integration that allows users to send their Prometheus data to New Relic's Telemetry Data Platform, which provides a fully managed, elastic time series platform for storing and querying telemetry data. This integration enables users to overcome the limitations of standard Prometheus environments, such as data durability, scalability, and global views, while eliminating the need for vendor-managed solutions and reducing operational burdens. The platform offers 13 months of retention, scalable architecture, and enterprise-grade security, making it an attractive option for users looking to unify their telemetry data from various sources.

New Relic has launched new pricing that simplifies observability for users and teams by eliminating three common pain points: hidden costs of "sampling", too many tools and cost vectors, and the outdated concept of paying per host. The new pricing offers a perpetually free tier with 100 GB of free data ingest, unlimited basic users, and one free standard user, as well as flexible pay-as-you-go and commit pricing options. This move aims to remove barriers to true observability and allow users to instrument everything without penalty, making it easier for teams to focus on their software and customers.

New Relic has revamped its pricing model to simplify observability for users, introducing a perpetually free tier and reducing costs associated with data ingestion and user access. The new pricing structure aims to address common challenges in observability, such as hidden costs related to data sampling, complicated pricing models involving multiple tools, and outdated host-based pricing methods. The free tier includes 100 GB of data ingestion per month and unlimited basic users who can query data and create dashboards. A standard plan is available for $99 per user, offering comprehensive access to New Relic's platform, which includes application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and more. The pricing model allows for flexible pay-as-you-go options and volume discounts for annual commitments, aiming to provide transparency and scalability akin to cloud services. This change is designed to eliminate barriers to comprehensive data collection and monitoring, enabling users to instrument their systems without financial penalties.

Prometheus, a widely-used open-source monitoring tool, is now integrated into New Relic’s Telemetry Data Platform to address scalability and management challenges faced by users. While Prometheus is popular for its ease of installation and compatibility with tools like Kubernetes and Grafana, it struggles with issues such as limited data retention, complex management, and scalability constraints. New Relic's platform offers a solution by providing a fully managed, elastic time series database that supports 13 months of retention and seamless data integration, allowing users to query and visualize data efficiently. The integration includes Prometheus remote write capability, enabling users to continue operating their existing Prometheus environments while benefiting from New Relic’s advanced features, such as global data views, enhanced security, and ease of management. The platform also facilitates the transition by supporting PromQL-style syntax and translating it into New Relic Query Language (NRQL) for compatibility.

New Relic has launched a reimagined version of New Relic One, aimed at simplifying observability by unifying its product suite into three comprehensive components, offering a streamlined user experience and simplified pricing. This revamped platform addresses previous challenges of tool sprawl and data silos by integrating all observability data into a single source of truth, making it more accessible and affordable with a pricing model of $0.30 per gigabyte of data ingestion and a perpetual free tier offering. The platform now includes Full-Stack Observability licensed per user, eliminating the need for disparate tools and enhancing troubleshooting capabilities through AIOps and machine learning. The new UI consolidates all functionalities into a modern interface, ensuring ease of use without requiring additional training for current users. This update reflects New Relic's commitment to providing powerful tools accessible to both large enterprises and individual developers, with the potential for significant cost savings and increased productivity.

Open source software is increasingly dominating cloud-native instrumentation, with a significant shift expected by 2025 towards open-source solutions for cloud-native application monitoring, as predicted by Gartner. New Relic emphasizes the challenges posed by tool fragmentation and the operational burdens of managing open-source data stores, which often lead to inefficiencies and increased costs. To address these issues, New Relic has introduced the Telemetry Data Platform, a unified, fully managed SaaS platform designed to ingest, analyze, visualize, and alert on telemetry data from various sources, including open-source and proprietary tools, thereby streamlining observability practices and reducing mean time to resolution. The platform promises enterprise-grade security, scalability, and compatibility with existing tools like Grafana, allowing organizations to consolidate their monitoring efforts and enabling more efficient issue resolution. While the blog underscores the potential of open-source solutions, it also highlights the complexities involved and suggests a comprehensive, centralized approach to managing telemetry data to enhance observability and operational efficiency.

New Relic Infrastructure is designed to help ops teams navigate the dynamic and fast-paced world of development releases and new technologies by providing real-time visibility into every metric and event on any host across their infrastructure, enabling them to scale rapidly, deploy intelligently, and be more proactive about infrastructure monitoring. With its key benefits including reducing mean time to detection and resolution, ensuring uptime and consistency, deploying with greater confidence, and accelerating time to value, New Relic Infrastructure delivers real-time health metrics correlated with recent configuration changes to help teams reduce downtime and improve overall performance. The platform also offers easy correlation between config change events and health metrics, custom querying and dashboards, live-state event feed with complete change history, accurate inventory of all hosts and instances, powerful infrastructure-wide search, tag-driven alerting and dashboarding, native support for AWS tags and metadata, and integrations with popular AWS services.

The Kubernetes ecosystem is a complex and rapidly evolving environment that has gained significant popularity in recent years due to its ability to manage containers and orchestrate applications at scale. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) plays a crucial role in promoting and maintaining the ecosystem, with projects like Kubernetes, OpenFaaS, and Inlets being developed and maintained by the community. Alex Ellis, CNCF Ambassador and founder of OpenFaaS and Inlets, joins Jonan Scheffler to discuss his experiences and insights on the ecosystem, including the challenges faced by developers in adopting serverless technologies and the importance of finding a balance between open-core licensing and paid support models. The conversation touches on topics such as Helm charts, Kubernetes orchestration, and the need for simplicity and usability in the ecosystem.

New Relic Infrastructure is designed to help operations teams manage the complexities of modern infrastructure by providing real-time visibility into metrics and events across various environments, such as AWS, Docker, and bare metal. It aims to enhance operational efficiency by reducing mean time to detection (MTTD) and resolution (MTTR) while ensuring uptime and consistency. With features like easy correlation of configuration changes and health metrics, custom querying, and dashboards, it facilitates collaboration among DevOps teams. New Relic offers integrated support for AWS, allowing users to monitor services like EC2, CloudFront, DynamoDB, and more, with native AWS tag and metadata support. The platform provides a comprehensive view of infrastructure performance, enabling proactive monitoring and management, all accessible with free full platform access up to 100GB per month.

In this episode of the Observy McObservface podcast, host Jonan Scheffler speaks with Alex Ellis, a CNCF Ambassador and founder of OpenFaaS and Inlets, about the modern cloud ecosystem and the role of organizations like the CNCF in shaping the future of technology. They discuss the intricacies of serverless technology, Kubernetes, and how these innovations are transforming IT into a more agile and developer-friendly process. Ellis explains the challenges and opportunities within the open-source community, emphasizing the need for sustainable open-core licensing models and the importance of community support for open-source maintainers. Through personal insights and professional experiences, Ellis highlights the significance of cloud-native solutions and the evolving landscape of technology conferences like KubeCon, while also addressing the financial realities and strategies for maintaining open-source projects.

Cloud native services offer several advantages over traditional infrastructure, including the ability to break down monolithic applications into microservices and scale infrastructure and application capacity on demand. To realize these benefits, organizations must adopt a cultural shift in technology adoption and experimentation, addressing three critical areas: easy adoption of new technologies, freedom to experiment with confidence, and ability to scale with ease. New Relic can help achieve these goals by providing a platform for adopting new technologies easily, experimenting with confidence, and scaling with ease, through its "Observability by Design" approach, which embeds instrumentation into the fiber of cloud native adoption strategy and practice, enabling organizations to leverage New Relic as a strategic advisor.

Businesses seeking to harness the benefits of cloud native services, such as breaking down monolithic applications into microservices and scaling infrastructure on demand, must embrace a cultural shift towards technology adoption and experimentation. A successful transition to cloud native infrastructure involves three key areas: the easy adoption of new technologies, the freedom to experiment confidently, and the ability to scale efficiently. New Relic One plays a vital role in this process by simplifying technology adoption and offering full-stack observability, which supports experimentation and scalability. By providing comprehensive data insights and telemetry visualization, New Relic serves as a strategic advisor, helping organizations optimize their cloud native strategies and unlock true cloud value. This approach not only enhances agility and scalability but also offers potential cost savings, reinforcing the importance of adopting a cloud native culture for digital modernization.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on Chegg's business, with record traffic and demand for its services surging due to the shift to online learning. To handle this growth, Chegg relied on New Relic One, an observability platform that helped detect, measure, and iterate on improving mean time to resolution (MTTR). By instrumenting hundreds of hosts in AWS and more than 500 services with New Relic, Chegg was able to reduce MTTR from 197 minutes to 24 minutes, and ultimately weather the pandemic's disruptions. The company also saw an uptick in interest in its services, a shift in usage patterns, and increased international traffic, which presented challenges but were mitigated by their existing relationship with New Relic. With Chegg now better prepared for the demands of the fall semester, they are confident in their ability to meet the needs of their customers.

Strength in Numbers is a blog series examining how Covid-19 impacted New Relic customers, focusing on Chegg, an online learning platform that experienced a surge in demand as educational institutions moved online in early 2020. Chegg, which offers digital educational resources, faced unprecedented traffic as students sought alternatives to on-campus services, such as writing centers, due to pandemic-related closures. To manage this increased demand and maintain trust with its users, Chegg relied on New Relic's monitoring tools to enhance its service reliability, reduce mean time to resolution, and handle the international traffic surge effectively. This preparation allowed Chegg to avoid disruptions during critical periods, enabling the company to focus on future growth initiatives and a smooth transition into the fall semester. The article highlights the importance of robust infrastructure and strategic planning in adapting to sudden changes in user behavior, with Chegg's successful navigation of these challenges serving as a testament to the effectiveness of its collaboration with New Relic.

Ivan De Marino, Lead Software Engineer at New Relic, has a unique career path that involves working twice at the company. He joined in 2014 and worked until 2018 to build Synthetics, a new offering for New Relic, before returning as Lead Software Engineer for the Kafka platform team in March this year. Ivan attributes his return to New Relic due to missing their products, especially NRDB, and feeling a sense of mission and purpose that aligns with his values. He praises the company culture, particularly accountability, which emphasizes taking responsibility for mistakes and learning from them. Ivan shares three tips for someone interested in joining the engineering team: establishing a solid relationship with code and software, assuming people have the best intentions in communication, and never beating oneself up over mistakes. New Relic offers opportunities for growth and career development, including support for AWS certifications and paying for exam fees.

The "Life at New Relic" blog series highlights employee experiences, focusing on Ivan De Marino, a Lead Software Engineer based in Munich, who has had two stints at the company. Ivan initially joined New Relic in 2014 to lead a team developing Synthetics, a product that marked the company's first foray into cloud-based infrastructure using AWS, and returned in 2023 to work on the Kafka platform team. He values New Relic for its sense of mission, collaborative culture, and the opportunity to make impactful contributions, citing a supportive environment that encourages growth and accountability without blame. Ivan provides insights for potential engineers, emphasizing passion in coding, effective communication, and the importance of learning from mistakes, noting that New Relic supports career development, including AWS certifications.

Telegraf is a server-based agent that collects metrics from inputs—applications, databases, message queues, and more—and writes them into outputs, like New Relic’s Metric API. The New Relic output plugin for Telegraf allows users to send custom metrics to New Relic, providing a single platform for ingesting, analyzing, visualizing, and alerting on telemetry data from various sources. With its plugin-driven architecture and lightweight footprint, Telegraf is a popular tool for collecting metrics from diverse input sources, with over 200 integrations available. The example configuration demonstrates how to ingest log data from a message queue and send it to New Relic as custom metrics using the Tail input plugin, JSON format, and the new New Relic output plugin.

The blog post by Harkamal Singh and Jim Hagan discusses the integration of Telegraf, a server-based agent for collecting metrics, with New Relic, a platform for telemetry data analysis. As teams face challenges in managing multiple layers of open-source telemetry tools, New Relic offers a unified solution for ingesting, analyzing, and visualizing data from various sources through APIs and SDKs. The post explains how Telegraf’s plugin-driven architecture can be utilized to send custom metrics to New Relic using the New Relic output plugin, highlighting its flexibility in handling diverse data formats and sources. It provides a step-by-step guide to configure Telegraf for ingesting data from message queues and sending it to New Relic as custom metrics. Furthermore, the article emphasizes the benefits of integrating open-source telemetry tools with New Relic to streamline workflows and enhance data visibility within a unified platform, alongside offering insights into the broader ecosystem of New Relic's telemetry capabilities.

At New Relic, they aim to enable every engineer to gather complete telemetry from their software and systems by making their instrumentation open source. This move aims to provide transparency about the code deployed to systems, engage with developers on feedback, and increase innovation and product quality. The company is contributing its agents, integrations, and SDKs to OpenTelemetry, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, standardizing on it for future observability offerings. By doing so, they're making instrumentation easier to adopt, providing an open source downstream extension of OpenTelemetry, and delivering production-ready agents for all programming languages by summer 2021. This announcement marks a significant step towards the company's commitment to open instrumentation, enabling engineers to play a part in this journey with New Relic's expertise and collaboration.

New Relic, a key player in software observability, has announced the open-sourcing of its agents, integrations, and SDKs, marking a significant shift towards open instrumentation. With a history of substantial contributions to the OpenTelemetry project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, New Relic is committed to standardizing its future observability offerings on this emerging standard. This move includes making available agents for multiple programming languages like C, Go, .NET, and more, with plans to extend support to others like Java and PHP. By publishing roadmaps and encouraging community engagement through GitHub, New Relic aims to foster innovation, transparency, and collaboration in software instrumentation. This initiative aligns with their strategy to offer a comprehensive application service observability solution while contributing to the development of a unified framework that benefits the broader community.

The company New Relic is launching a new podcast called Observy McObservface to discuss observability and its impact on the software industry. The podcast was named by the internet, which the team found out about through A/B testing and market positioning studies. However, they decided to leave it up to the people and were rewarded with a four-year-old internet joke. The first episode features Bill Staples, New Relic's Chief Product Officer, who shares his thoughts on observability and how it's shaping the industry. He emphasizes the importance of open source and how Microsoft has been embracing this approach since the early 2000s. Bill also talks about how New Relic is trying to solve the problem of making sense of large volumes of data from various sources, allowing developers to take action on that data in real-time. The podcast aims to catalog progress in the observability landscape and encourage predictions for where it will go next.

Observy McObservface is a podcast created by New Relic, with the name humorously chosen by the internet, to explore the evolving field of observability and its impact on the software industry. The inaugural episode features Bill Staples, New Relic's Chief Product Officer, who shares insights from his extensive career in software, including his experiences at Microsoft where he witnessed the company's shift towards embracing open source software. Staples emphasizes the importance of customer-focused technology development and discusses New Relic's commitment to integrating open source projects with their observability platforms to handle the vast data generated by complex systems. He advocates for a future where comprehensive instrumentation and real-time data analysis become standard practices, highlighting the need for authenticity and customer-centricity in leadership and product development. The podcast encourages listeners to engage with its content and contribute ideas for future episodes, aligning with New Relic’s community-focused ethos.

Daniel Fitzgerald from New Relic highlights how open-source monitoring, particularly using Micrometer with Spring Boot, can integrate telemetry data into New Relic One to prevent data silos and enhance service monitoring. The New Relic Micrometer registry allows applications to send metrics to New Relic, offering a powerful and flexible way to collect, expose, and analyze metrics such as counters, gauges, timers, and distribution summaries. It supports the differentiation between tracing and metrics, where tracing provides a detailed view of request flows and metrics offer quantitative insights into performance over time. The blog further explains the setup and benefits of using the New Relic Micrometer registry through a demo involving the Spring Pet Clinic Microservices, emphasizing best practices in monitoring, such as defining clear goals, using meter filters, and integrating with time-series databases like Prometheus. The post also discusses leveraging distributed tracing and the importance of adapting monitoring strategies as applications evolve, alongside New Relic's efforts in open instrumentation initiatives like OpenTelemetry to enhance telemetry data usability.

Serverless architecture can be difficult to observe and debug due to its event-based nature, which makes it challenging to connect events and understand how they impact each other. This leads to issues with security configuration, cold starts, and observability, particularly when dealing with high-velocity data from multiple cloud services. To address these challenges, structured logs and AWS X-Ray integration can provide valuable insights into the application's underlying components, but it is essential for developers to plan for observability as they write their code, making sure that only relevant details are left to the vendor to handle.

Miriam Rowley, Engineering Manager at New Relic, joined the company a year ago after leading a team of IT infrastructure specialists at a large manufacturing engineering company. She was drawn to New Relic's values of authenticity, connectedness, and passionate engagement, which resonated with her non-traditional path into tech. Miriam is proud to work in an environment where people genuinely care about helping others succeed, and she appreciates the open and collaborative culture that allows her to leverage collective knowledge. She identifies New Relic's accountability value as core to her success, and values like boldness and authenticity that allow her to grow both personally and professionally. As a manager, Miriam emphasizes the importance of listening, collaboration, and "keeping showing up" for those around her, and offers tips for success in her role, including reading up on the company, reaching out to people, and attending events. With New Relic's emphasis on customer success and team growth, Miriam is proud to be a part of an organization that prioritizes helping others succeed both within and outside the company.

Serverless computing, while idealized as eliminating all hosting concerns through vendor management, still presents challenges like security configuration, cold starts, and particularly observability issues. Observability in serverless architectures, often event-based, is complex due to the asynchronous nature of events handled by multiple services. This complexity makes tracing specific events difficult, often requiring structured logs and tools like AWS X-Ray for insights. However, these tools, while beneficial, are limited in providing complete performance insights, necessitating integration with broader observability solutions. The responsibility for effective observability ultimately lies with the developers, who must plan for it within their code to ensure meaningful insights.

Miriam Rowley, the Engineering Manager at New Relic, shares her unique journey into the tech industry, highlighting her transition from a background in pre-med and psychology to leading multiple engineering teams. Her career at New Relic began with managing a single team and has expanded to overseeing three groups, which she attributes to the company's appreciation of interdisciplinary skills. Miriam praises New Relic's environment for its authenticity, connectedness, and passion, noting that these values are not just corporate slogans but are actively embodied by employees. She values collaboration and mentorship within the company, emphasizing the importance of listening, accountability, and continuous personal and professional growth. Miriam also expresses pride in a project focused on improving customer experience by leveraging internal insights, illustrating her commitment to enhancing product quality and team effectiveness. She advises those interested in joining New Relic to engage deeply with the company's mission, connect with current employees, and actively participate in company events, whether in-person or virtual, to better understand and align with its culture.

AWS X-Ray integration with New Relic provides a single debugging and triaging experience for distributed tracing across AWS services and traditional ecosystems, enabling developers to pinpoint services causing errors and performance bottlenecks, and resolve issues faster by automatically capturing calls outside of AWS and providing visibility into trace data from AWS-managed services. The integration combines the capabilities of New Relic's distributed tracing with X-Ray, allowing users to see a view of requests as they travel through their applications, along with filtering, querying, and visualizing trace data to quickly debug issues.

AWS X-Ray and New Relic have introduced a new integration that enhances distributed tracing capabilities by combining the functionalities of both tools into a unified experience, addressing the challenge of obtaining visibility across both AWS-managed services and external applications. While AWS X-Ray provides critical insights into AWS services, it previously lacked automatic tracing for non-AWS calls; conversely, New Relic offered automatic tracing for any application where its agent was installed but lacked visibility into AWS-managed services. This integration allows developers to see requests as they move through applications, offering filtering, querying, and visualization of trace data to effectively debug issues and identify performance bottlenecks. Users can now achieve transparency in transactions occurring within AWS, similar to those in their hosted environments, thus simplifying troubleshooting and reducing the time to pinpoint errors.

The OpenTelemetry project is an open-source telemetry framework that aims to be robust, portable, and easy to implement across many languages. It provides a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics from applications. The first beta release includes specifications and SDKs for instrumenting applications in Erlang, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python. OpenTelemetry is designed to work with existing tools such as New Relic One, allowing users to discover latency within requests, identify bottlenecks and failures, and gain insights into their distributed systems. The project also includes a Java agent that can dynamically inject bytecode to capture telemetry from popular libraries and frameworks, providing an easy way to instrument third-party libraries without modifying code. With the first beta release, OpenTelemetry offers a robust solution for distributed tracing and observability, enabling developers to better understand the performance and behavior of their applications.

Large-scale distributed systems, composed of interconnected microservices, often suffer from hidden dependencies, making distributed tracing essential for tracking requests across service boundaries and identifying latency, bottlenecks, and failures. OpenTelemetry, an open-source telemetry framework born from the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus, is designed to be robust, portable, and easy to implement across multiple languages, offering APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics. It maintains backward compatibility with OpenTracing and OpenCensus, allowing seamless migration without breaking changes. The article highlights the beta release of OpenTelemetry, which includes SDKs for languages like Erlang, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python, and details its integration with New Relic for monitoring Java applications through both manual and automatic instrumentation. It explains how OpenTelemetry's architecture, including its API, SDK, and Collector, supports exporting data to various formats and observability tools, and provides examples of instrumenting Java applications to send telemetry data to New Relic.

Organizations that prioritize software excellence report higher revenue growth and better brand perception, pace of innovation, employee engagement, and more. According to Gene Kim, DevOps researcher and WSJ bestselling author, organizations can develop more perfect software by achieving the "two pizza team" ideal, where each team works independently to develop, test, and deploy value. Focus, flow, and joy are also crucial for productivity. Legacy systems and architecture make it difficult to develop perfect software, but improving daily work is key. Observability enables real-time feedback, allowing organizations to link cause and effect and experiment with new features. A culture that integrates observability into how they work is essential. Organizations need to focus on three areas: putting in place the right architecture, developing the right technical practices, and establishing the right cultural norms. A cloud-native approach can help teams work independently and test components isolated from each other. Finally, leaders need to unleash the talent they already have within their organizations by providing training and development opportunities.

Organizations that prioritize software excellence often experience higher revenue growth and outperform peers in brand perception, innovation, and employee engagement. Gene Kim, a DevOps researcher, emphasizes the importance of adopting DevOps practices, such as the "two pizza team" concept, to foster independent and efficient software development. He highlights that legacy systems burdened with technical debt can hinder progress, advocating for improving daily work and observability to facilitate experimentation and problem resolution. Observability, which provides real-time insights into software performance, is crucial for high-performing organizations, enabling faster deployments and problem-solving. Kim also stresses the importance of cultural norms that support transparency and employee engagement, which contribute to better outcomes. While cloud-native architecture isn't mandatory, having loosely coupled systems is vital for independent testing and development. Moreover, Kim suggests that leaders focus on unleashing existing talent rather than solely recruiting new skills, as demonstrated by General Motors' transformation of its Fremont plant through a partnership with Toyota.

This blog series explores how to improve observability with SolarWinds and integrate it with New Relic Applied Intelligence (AI). To enhance data ingestion from SolarWinds Orion, alerts can be used as a starting point for data collection. The process involves sending SolarWinds alerts to the New Relic Events API or REST API for AI, reducing alert fatigue and improving mean time to resolution (MTTR). By utilizing these integrations, teams can dynamically correlate incidents across multiple monitoring tools and data sources, providing real-time insights into system performance and enabling more effective incident response.

The blog series delves into enhancing observability with SolarWinds by integrating its alerts into New Relic Applied Intelligence (AI), aiming to improve incident correlation and reduce alert fatigue. It demonstrates how to send alerts from SolarWinds Orion to New Relic's Events API and REST API, allowing for dynamic incident correlation and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR). By using GET or POST requests, users can send alert data to New Relic, incorporating metadata for better incident management and correlation. This integration seeks to offer more effective observability practices and streamline troubleshooting workflows, with insights provided by Zack Mutchler, a Senior Manager at New Relic. The blog emphasizes the importance of metadata in observability and how it aids New Relic AI in improving incident response and correlation processes. Additionally, readers are encouraged to explore previous parts of the series and engage with the author through the Explorers Hub for further insights.

Musement, a digital platform for booking travel activities, expanded its software organization to support aggressive growth by decoupling components of its custom application into microservices. To achieve this, Musement adopted cloud-native technologies and leveraged the New Relic monitoring tool to ensure scalability, performance, and compliance with service level agreements (SLAs). By using New Relic's capabilities, such as tracking business metrics and identifying technical debt, Musement was able to optimize its infrastructure, reduce costs, and improve customer experience. The company plans to expand its offering to more than one million activities in the coming year.

Musement, a digital platform founded in 2013 for booking travel activities, is transitioning from a monolithic to a microservices architecture to support its rapid growth and innovation goals, aiming to offer over one million activities in more than 1,000 destinations worldwide. This shift, facilitated by New Relic's comprehensive monitoring capabilities, allows Musement to decouple its core application and adopt cloud-native technologies, enhancing the flexibility and scalability of its software organization. New Relic's insights assist in maintaining service level agreements, tracking business metrics, and reducing technical debt, ensuring that Musement can swiftly address issues and optimize performance. As part of the TUI Group since 2018, Musement leverages its agile digital framework to drive TUI's broader digital transformation, with New Relic playing a crucial role in monitoring and optimizing their end-to-end technology stack.

New Relic One allows developers to build and deploy custom apps that provide unique views of data from various sources, catering to each company's specific business requirements. The platform showcases popular open-source apps, including Flex Manager, GraphiQL Notebook, and Attributory, which can be used out-of-the-box or customized with pull requests. To deploy these apps, developers require access to New Relic One, the CLI, a personal API key, Node v10 or higher, and a GitHub account. The process involves cloning or downloading the app from GitHub, configuring it, and deploying it through the CLI or by publishing an account-specific instance. New Relic provides various resources for building custom apps, including documentation, tutorials, and community forums, to help developers explore and contribute to open-source projects.

New Relic One offers a platform for building and deploying custom applications to meet the specific data and visibility needs of diverse company technology stacks, with a focus on open-source solutions. Highlighting its versatility, the platform allows developers to connect data from any source to align with business requirements and offers a suite of popular open-source apps such as Flex Manager, GraphiQL Notebook, and Attributory to assist engineers in their roles. These apps can be managed and deployed directly within New Relic One, either out-of-the-box or customized through the CLI. Developers can access and contribute to these apps via GitHub, enhancing their capabilities or integrating them more deeply into existing systems. Additionally, New Relic provides extensive resources and tools, including a developer toolkit and community support, to facilitate app building and deployment, encouraging contributions from the open-source community under a Contributor License Agreement.

The New Relic Developer Toolkit offers a suite of tools to reduce development toil, including a Kubernetes Operator that provides a seamless way to deploy New Relic resources alongside Kubernetes deployments. The operator follows the control loop pattern and allows developers to configure their New Relic monitoring resources using the same configuration files as their other Kubernetes configurations. To use the operator, developers must first install it in their Kubernetes cluster, which involves installing cert-manager and running kustomize commands. Once installed, developers can create and manage New Relic alert policies and NRQL alert conditions using kubectl apply commands. The operator provides a declarative approach to creating alert policies, allowing developers to write configuration files that define the desired behavior of their alert policies. With the operator, developers can automate their workflows and gain consistency and maintainability in their alert configurations.

The New Relic Developer Toolkit includes a Kubernetes Operator designed to integrate New Relic's monitoring resources with Kubernetes deployments, facilitating observability as code. The post details the utility of Kubernetes Operators, which are software extensions that use custom resources to manage applications and components, emphasizing their role in deploying New Relic resources seamlessly. It provides a step-by-step guide on installing the New Relic Kubernetes Operator, creating alert policies, and configuring NRQL alert conditions using Kubernetes configuration files. This approach allows developers to manage monitoring alerts consistently within their Kubernetes workflow, enhancing maintainability and enabling code reviews for changes. The New Relic Kubernetes Operator is part of a broader suite of tools aimed at reducing developer toil and automating workflows, aligning with Kubernetes' principles and supporting the management of third-party services through custom Kubernetes objects.