March 2021 Summaries

In a significant growth milestone, worldwide cloud spending surged 32% in Q4 2020 to $39.9 billion, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominating the market at 31%. New Relic and AWS have strengthened their strategic partnership by jointly announcing an integration update for their services, specifically integrating Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams with New Relic One. This integration enables reduced metric latency, allowing for faster alerting and dashboards, and streamlines data processing to avoid API throttling and service quota management. By leveraging this integration, users can benefit from speed, cost savings, and automated setup, as well as improved visibility into AWS services and enhanced analytics capabilities.

In the fourth quarter of 2020, global cloud spending surged by 32% to $39.9 billion, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominating nearly a third of the market. As strategic partners, New Relic and AWS announced a new integration that enhances New Relic One by incorporating Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams, enabling more efficient monitoring of AWS services. This integration reduces metric latency and costs while eliminating API throttling and service quota management, allowing for faster and more responsive alerting and dashboards. Users can set up Metric Streams manually or automate the process using AWS CloudFormation, which supports targeted filtering of metrics. The setup enables seamless data streaming from AWS services to New Relic One, facilitating enhanced analysis and visualization of cloud-based application metrics.

Many people who work in tech need to create secure systems without being security experts. I tried rewriting the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 list in a simplified style using only the 1,000 most commonly used English words, inspired by Randall Munroe's xkcd comic and book. The results are mixed, with some ideas translating well but others becoming distorted or incomprehensible. I'm not advocating for everyone to write technical communications in this style, but rather exploring what can be learned from the attempt, where it works and where it doesn't. Specialized terms can allow us to communicate quickly about foundational concepts, but they can also intimidate people who aren't versed in security jargon. To make technical communication more accessible, we should choose simpler language, pick examples or metaphors our audience is familiar with, and provide definitions for key terms. However, oversimplifying complex concepts can lead to misunderstandings, and creating a sentence from "simple" words doesn't always make it easier to understand. Ultimately, choosing the right words to convey an idea is hard, but using only the top ten hundred words in English can help us look at it in a different way.

An experiment inspired by xkcd creator Randall Munroe attempts to simplify complex information security concepts from the OWASP Top 10 using only the 1,000 most common English words. While the exercise reveals the humor and challenges of communicating technical ideas in plain language, it highlights the difficulty of translating specialized terms without losing essential meaning. The author, a security engineer, found that while some security concepts can be conveyed in simple terms, others become incoherent or lose critical nuances. This experiment underscores the importance of balancing accessibility and accuracy in technical communication, especially in information security, where understanding and implementing best practices are crucial. Simplifying language can make technical concepts more approachable, yet some specialized terms remain indispensable for precise communication. The exercise ultimately encourages rethinking how to communicate effectively with diverse audiences, including those without a background in the field, and reflects on the role of clear, relatable examples and metaphors in bridging the gap between complex ideas and broader understanding.

New Relic is offering a new feature called Lookout that enables engineers to instantly drill down into performance changes in their apps or systems with real-time visualization of all system components. This feature helps engineers detect abnormal behavior and gain faster incident resolution through automatically surfaced causes and effects. Additionally, New Relic has introduced guided install, which eliminates error-prone configuration and drastically reduces the effort needed to get visibility into systems. The company is also making its documentation open source, allowing users to edit and file issues. New Relic customers can sign up for weekly updates about the latest features and releases by joining the Nerdlog discussion every Thursday at 12 p.m. PT on Twitch or following along in What's New.

New Relic offers several unique features designed to enhance engineers' ability to monitor and analyze system performance. The Nerdlog provides weekly updates and discussions on these features, with sessions held every Thursday on Twitch. The New Relic Lookout tool allows engineers to quickly identify and investigate performance changes through a color-coded visualization, while the guided install feature simplifies the process of instrumenting applications and infrastructure with minimal configuration. Additionally, New Relic's open-source documentation invites user contributions and edits, fostering community engagement. The blog post, authored by John Kinmonth, emphasizes New Relic's commitment to product-led growth and highlights his extensive experience in product marketing and observability solutions. It is noted that the views expressed are the author's own and may not reflect those of New Relic.

Women are making significant contributions to tech, with more women developers, engineers, and business leaders than ever before. However, despite progress, there's still work to be done to achieve gender equality in the industry. To celebrate International Women's Day, the author gave to organizations that support trans people, protect sex workers, and pursue racial justice. The author then shared a list of inspiring women in tech, including developers, engineers, advocates, and leaders who are breaking barriers and pushing boundaries in their fields. From senior DevRel engineers to product strategists, these women are making a positive impact on the industry and beyond.

The blog post highlights the celebration of International Women’s Day and Women's History Month, recognizing the achievements of women in various fields, particularly in technology. It underscores the progress made by women in roles such as developers, engineers, and business leaders, while also acknowledging the ongoing work needed to achieve gender equality. The author shares a personal initiative to support organizations advocating for trans people, sex workers, and racial justice. The article also features a curated list of influential women and non-binary individuals in the tech industry, providing reasons to follow each on social media, celebrating their contributions, leadership, and advocacy in fields ranging from software engineering to cybersecurity. The post concludes with a note from the author, Nočnica Fee, discussing the personal enjoyment of her hobbies and clarifying that the views expressed do not represent her employer, New Relic, and encourages readers to engage with New Relic's community for further discussion.

The Kubernetes ecosystem has experienced significant growth since its open sourcing by Google in 2014. As a result, there is a high demand for skilled developers and administrators who can orchestrate containerized workloads and services in production. Organizations are eager to find professionals with Kubernetes expertise, with job postings on LinkedIn showing over 47,000 jobs related to the topic. The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), and Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) certifications are popular among IT professionals, with the CKA being considered one of the most challenging. To prepare for these exams, candidates need to practice using a terminal and learn core concepts such as scheduling, logging, monitoring, security, storage, and troubleshooting. The CNCF offers five different certifications, including two for companies, which demonstrate their staff's skills in delivering Kubernetes services or show that their software products are certified for Kubernetes environments. With the demand for Kubernetes knowledge and skills on the rise, getting certified can be a valuable asset for job seekers.

Since Google open-sourced Kubernetes in 2014, its adoption has surged, with a significant 78% of enterprises using it for orchestrating containerized workloads, leading to a high demand for skilled Kubernetes professionals. Salaries for experts in this field are notably high, with averages ranging from $115,000 to over $147,000. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) offers five certifications related to Kubernetes, focusing mainly on three professional certifications: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), and Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS). These certifications require passing challenging, performance-based online exams that test various skills essential for Kubernetes management, development, and security. Preparation is crucial, with numerous resources available, including courses from platforms like Udemy and the Linux Foundation. Additionally, practical experience with terminal commands and tools is emphasized to ensure efficiency and time management during the exams, which are considered beneficial for career advancement and understanding the Kubernetes ecosystem.

This company, Viewpoint, a services provider for the construction industry, embarked on a cloud migration journey to modernize their legacy applications. They faced challenges in monitoring and instrumenting their single-tenant applications, which led them to explore New Relic as a solution. With New Relic One, they achieved significant benefits including reduced monitoring costs by 57%, improved end-to-end observability, and better detection of performance issues. This allowed them to proactively address problems, improve engineering efficiency, and provide a better digital experience for their customers. The partnership with New Relic was also crucial in helping Viewpoint navigate the complex cloud migration process, offering support, guidance, and fast response times when needed. By leveraging New Relic One, Viewpoint simplified their cloud migration efforts and gained a competitive edge in the market.

Viewpoint's transition of legacy single-tenant applications to the cloud, in collaboration with New Relic, exemplifies how cloud migration can be streamlined and made cost-effective with enhanced observability. Initially facing challenges with limited visibility and high costs from their existing monitoring tools, Viewpoint leveraged New Relic One to instrument their infrastructure and applications, significantly reducing monitoring costs by 57% and cutting down false positive alerts from 3,500 to 600 per week. This newfound efficiency allowed for proactive identification and resolution of performance issues, such as a back-end integration service's performance improvement by tenfold after isolating middleware components. The partnership with New Relic not only facilitated a seamless transition to Kubernetes clusters in the cloud but also enhanced engineering efficiency and customer experience by enabling proactive problem-solving, transparency through tailored dashboards, and the ability to conduct comprehensive performance testing. The collaboration underscores the importance of having a committed partner in navigating the complexities of cloud migration, thereby ensuring minimal downtime and optimized performance for construction management applications critical to Viewpoint's clients.

New Relic's Applied Intelligence feature uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect anomalies in services, providing context clues and flagging patterns that look concerning. This feature complements traditional alerting by warning users about issues they didn't predict. The feature also provides root cause analysis, automatically analyzing issues and proposing a root cause on an issue page in Alerts & AI. Additionally, topology correlation increases context for issues by discovering relationships between anomalies and entities within the same service. These features aim to reduce alert noise and fatigue, allowing users to prioritize problems more efficiently.

New Relic's anomaly detection utilizes AIOps to alert users when a service appears to be in trouble, enhancing proactive detection by identifying concerning patterns through AI and ML. This feature supplements existing alert systems by warning about unforeseen issues, while the Applied Intelligence anomalies feed offers a centralized location for viewing these anomalies. Root cause analysis is automated to help identify issues and propose solutions, grouping related events to provide context without replacing human operators. Topology correlation adds a new layer to event correlation by connecting anomalies within the same service, thus improving the accuracy and speed of identifying related issues. These enhancements aim to reduce alert fatigue and streamline incident management, with additional resources available for users to learn about deploying these features.

The text discusses creating a Syslog dashboard as code using Terraform and New Relic One. It explains how dashboards can be manually maintained but are prone to errors and inefficiencies. The article shows an example of how to create a dashboard that organizes unstructured log data into attribute/value pairs, drives alerts based on subsets of log data, and provides a variety of options for data ingest. It covers the importance of understanding the Syslog format, creating a Terraform project, defining the dashboard, adding widgets and visualizations, applying the code, and setting up alerts for real-time notification. The article concludes by providing resources for further learning and exploring the Explorers Hub for questions and support related to the blog post.

Dashboards play a crucial role in visualizing performance metrics and swiftly resolving issues within a tech stack, but manual maintenance can be inefficient and insecure. To address this, engineers are increasingly adopting a "dashboards as code" approach, using tools like Terraform and New Relic's log management capabilities to automate creation and management. This method leverages the Syslog RFC-5424 format to organize logs into attribute/value pairs for enhanced observability and alerts. The process involves setting up a Terraform project, creating a Syslog dashboard using NRQL queries to visualize log data, and configuring widgets for various metrics, such as severity levels and application health, to facilitate real-time monitoring. Additionally, integrating alert systems like PagerDuty and Slack ensures timely notifications for critical issues, enhancing problem resolution efficiency. The blog post, authored by Edmo Vamerlatti from New Relic, provides a comprehensive guide to implementing these practices, with code examples available in a GitHub repository for practical application.

In the legacy monitoring world, resource consumption metrics were sufficient to measure availability and performance, but they don't cut it in DevOps and observability where workloads are highly variable, thresholds can be hard to set, and flexibility over measurement is needed. A new approach focuses on measuring speed and quality, using service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs), which provide a single, easy-to-understand metric that shows Ops and Engineering teams where to focus attention and enables non-technical stakeholders to make critical business decisions. By setting an SLI and SLO for key metrics such as response time and error rates, organizations can close the disconnect between IT and the business, achieve strong business alignment, clear indicators of trouble, simplicity, and ultimately, measurable success.

In the shift from traditional monitoring to a DevOps and observability-focused approach, the emphasis has moved from tracking granular resource consumption metrics to measuring speed and quality through service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs). This transition addresses the challenges posed by cloud environments and variable workloads, where setting thresholds can be difficult and maintaining a vast array of metrics becomes cumbersome and less valuable. The focus on speed and quality aligns IT efforts with business goals by using simple, understandable metrics that reflect the customer experience, such as error-free transaction percentages and response times. By setting SLIs and SLOs, organizations can effectively communicate performance and reliability to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, reducing alert fatigue and enhancing the relevance of alerts. This approach fosters business alignment by highlighting critical issues that impact user experience and provides a clearer indication of where improvements are needed, thereby bridging the gap between IT operations and business objectives.

New Relic Navigator has introduced a new high-powered view that displays all hosts, containers, and applications in a single, collective view, providing users with real-time insight into their entire stack without the need to scroll. This view offers a "traffic light" status for all entities at once, allowing users to quickly assess the overall health of their service. The feature is particularly useful for teams adopting microservice architecture, as it provides a high-level overview of the entire system in one glance.

In the context of the growing complexity of microservice architectures, New Relic Navigator offers a streamlined way to monitor hosts, containers, and applications, providing users with a consolidated "traffic light" status view of their entire stack. This enhanced perspective allows for quick insights into system health, crucial for teams that need to respond rapidly to issues. The latest Nerdlog episode highlights these updates and improvements, inviting users to participate in live discussions and stay informed through weekly emails. The blog emphasizes that the views expressed are those of the author, Nočnica Fee, and encourages engagement in the New Relic community for further support and information.

The proliferation of SaaS platforms and cloud computing has expanded the scope of personally identifiable information (PII) considerably, making it essential for digital businesses to manage PII in their log streams. To prevent sensitive data from entering the log stream, organizations can adopt application-level governance by implementing standards such as OWASP's logging guidelines, filtering logs using tools like log4j, and adopting drop rules to remove unwanted fields. Forwarding layer governance involves configuring filters and transformations to enforce monitoring and security standards, while pre-persistence SaaS backend governance utilizes New Relic's facilities for removing PII from log data through automatic obfuscation, custom obfuscation rules, and alert conditions. Post-persistence SaaS backend governance allows organizations to manage telemetry data into a master and sub-account structure, ensuring that sensitive information is protected according to internal company access policies. By implementing these approaches, digital businesses can effectively manage PII in their log data and ensure compliance with relevant regulations.

With the rise of cloud computing and SaaS platforms, managing personally identifiable information (PII) has become increasingly crucial, especially due to regulations like the GDPR. The text discusses methods to prevent PII from entering log streams, which is essential for legal and contractual compliance. It outlines a multi-layered approach to manage PII, starting from application-level governance, where internal practices can prevent sensitive data from being logged, to forwarding layer governance that involves filtering and obfuscation techniques using tools like fluentd or Logstash. Additionally, the text highlights how New Relic's backend provides facilities for pre-persistence governance through drop and obfuscation rules, as well as custom and automatic obfuscation configurations. It also addresses post-persistence governance by managing account access to telemetry data, ensuring that only authorized users can view sensitive information. These strategies help organizations maintain data privacy and security across their digital infrastructure.

You want observability, but you don't have the time and resources to spend weeks installing and configuring countless proprietary agents and integrations. Observability relies on connecting all of the dots across your complex environment, but deploying instrumentation is often too complex, leading to frustration and blind spots that prevent teams from ensuring customer performance. New Relic's guided install simplifies this process by providing a redesigned data onboarding experience that eliminates the need for specialized instrumentation expertise, empowering users to instrument their applications and infrastructure in minutes through intelligent, automated, and extensible processes.

New Relic's guided install offers a streamlined approach to achieving observability by simplifying the deployment of application and infrastructure instrumentation. The redesigned onboarding experience reduces the complexity and expertise typically required for instrumentation by using system-specific "recipes" that automatically detect and recommend instrumentation installations. This process not only minimizes manual errors but also accelerates the time-to-value for users, allowing them to achieve observability more efficiently. The extensible and open-source nature of the recipes, stored in New Relic's Open Install Library on GitHub, enables users to adapt or create their own solutions for unique telemetry needs. With the ability to easily integrate new telemetry-producing systems, New Relic's guided install aims to eliminate blind spots and ensure optimal software performance, all while offering free access to 100GB of data ingest per month and a full-stack observability user license for new users.

New Relic is a tool that helps businesses monitor and manage their technology systems for better observability. The company's Nerdlog series provides live tutorials and discussions about the latest features and updates to New Relic, including anomaly detection, correlation of failures, smart alert muting, and custom data visualizations. These features aim to help users gain insights into system performance, reduce false alerts, and improve overall monitoring efficiency. By leveraging AI-powered tools and automation capabilities, New Relic aims to provide a more comprehensive and user-friendly experience for its customers.

The text discusses a feature in New Relic's Applied Intelligence product called "suggested responders" that helps resolve production issues faster by identifying the most relevant team members to help resolve incidents in real-time. This feature uses machine learning (ML) to analyze past interactions and predict the most likely responders for new violations. The suggested responders model consists of three phases: supervised pattern recognition, label spreading, and a recommender engine. It provides a list of users who are most likely to resolve a certain violation, along with their likelihood scores. This feature can be used to route incident notifications to specific channels based on predicted suggested responders, ensuring that the right people are notified for the right incidents. The text also highlights how to get started with suggested responders and its benefits in increasing response efficiency and resolving production issues faster.

In a bid to enhance incident management and reduce resolution time, New Relic's Applied Intelligence product features a tool called "suggested responders," which uses machine learning to identify the most relevant team members for resolving production issues. By analyzing past incident data and user interactions, the system automatically recommends the most suitable responders in real-time, thereby minimizing unnecessary involvement and improving efficiency. The model employs a three-phase process—supervised pattern recognition, label spreading, and a recommender engine—to predict the likelihood of user involvement in resolving incidents. This tool integrates seamlessly with New Relic's platform, offering real-time suggestions directly in the issue notification payload, and allows users to provide feedback to refine the model further. For organizations not yet using New Relic's Applied Intelligence, a free account option is available to explore its capabilities.

Nerdlog, a resource from New Relic, offers insights into the latest observability features through weekly live sessions on Twitch, showcasing tools like New Relic AIOps for anomaly detection and Incident Intelligence for managing alerts. The platform allows users to analyze anomalies by various categories and facilitates integration with services like Slack for team alerts. The use of AI to identify correlated failures helps streamline alert management, while features such as smart alert muting enable engineers to manage notifications during planned maintenance without disabling monitoring. Additionally, New Relic's programmability tools empower users to create custom data visualizations and dashboards, enhancing data readability and resolution times. The blog encourages participation in live discussions and invites users to explore new features weekly, emphasizing that the views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily reflective of New Relic's official stance.

New Relic is open sourcing its documentation site `docs.newrelic.com`, allowing users to contribute to and edit the content. This move aligns with New Relic's principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, and community-oriented development. The new architecture is based on static sites, leveraging tools like Gatsby.js and GraphQL, making it responsive and flexible. The site includes features like automated migration, localization support, and easy feedback loops for reporting issues or discrepancies. With the new site, New Relic aims to enhance its documentation and collaborate with users to make it better.

New Relic is expanding its commitment to open source by making its documentation open for community contributions, aligning with its broader strategy of open exchange, transparency, and collaboration. The company has migrated its documentation site from Drupal 7 to a static JAMstack architecture using Gatsby.js and GraphQL, which facilitates efficient content management and quick site performance. This transition allows for seamless integration with New Relic's other platforms, enabling content to be shared across different interfaces. The use of open source technologies such as React, Emotion CSS, and MDX helps maintain a flexible, responsive design that supports localization and enhances user experience. The migration process was automated using codemods, transforming over 5,863 pieces of content swiftly, while YAML is employed for easy navigation management. New Relic encourages community engagement through GitHub, inviting users to file issues, suggest edits, and contribute to the improvement of its documentation, reflecting the company's dedication to fostering a collaborative environment.

FutureStack is a free, virtual observability event that will be held from May 25-27, featuring 3 keynotes, 12 hands-on workshops, and 50 sessions across four learning tracks focused on DevOps teams. The event includes networking opportunities, a 24-hour hackathon, and various relaxation activities, such as yoga sessions and live streaming events. Attendees can earn experience points and redeem them for swag and prizes by participating in the event's activities and networking with other attendees from around the world.

FutureStack is a global, virtual observability event taking place from May 25-27, offering an engaging platform for developers, engineers, and data enthusiasts to connect, learn, and get inspired. The event features three keynotes, 12 workshops, and 50 sessions covering topics like containerization, cloud migration, and AI/ML-powered observability, with four distinct learning tracks tailored to various interests and expertise levels. Participants can engage in interactive experiences, such as a 24-hour hackathon, networking sessions, and unique activities like yoga and DJ meet-ups, all while earning experience points that can be redeemed for prizes. FutureStack aims to create a dynamic and fun environment for attendees to explore new technologies and share ideas, with special guest appearances by tech leaders and cultural influencers. The event is organized by New Relic, with Maria Cardiff as the Senior Events Manager, and encourages attendees to join the Explorers Hub for further discussions and support.