June 2021 Summaries

Cognitran is a software as a service (SaaS) company that provides automotive manufacturers with diagnostic, repair, and maintenance information for technicians through its SaaS platform, which includes authoring and content management tools such as Blaise and ITIS. The company uses New Relic to gain end-to-end observability of its systems and services, allowing it to detect incidents, understand performance impacts, and make data-driven design changes. By leveraging business intelligence from New Relic, Cognitran can analyze trends in customer usage across different markets, gauge demand for ITIS system resources, and optimize Elasticsearch indexes and relational database indexes. The company's use of New Relic also enables it to provide customers with direct access to the same intelligence, enabling them to adjust their processes to improve efficiency without needing support from Cognitran.

Cognitran plays a crucial role in the automotive industry by providing software as a service (SaaS) that helps leading automotive manufacturers author, manage, and deliver essential diagnostic, repair, and maintenance information for technicians. Their two main offerings, Blaise and ITIS, are hosted on AWS and utilize microservices orchestrated with Terraform, offering global clients like Ford and Harley-Davidson 24/7/365 availability. A key component of Cognitran's operations is the use of New Relic for comprehensive observability, which allows them to monitor system performance, identify anomalies, and optimize customer experience by integrating custom business intelligence. This observability extends to DevOps decisions, enabling the company to proactively address potential issues and share real-time insights with customers, fostering transparency and trust. By leveraging New Relic, Cognitran not only enhances its software's reliability and performance but also empowers customers to make informed decisions, aligning strategic business responses with market trends.

The article highlights a group of LGBTQI+ pioneers in computer science who have made significant contributions to the development of modern computer technology. These individuals, including Sofia Kovalevskaya, Alan Turing, Christopher Strachey, Peter Landin, Edith Windsor, Lynn Conway, Jon Hall, Sophie Wilson, Mary Ann Horton, Audrey Tang, and others, lived and worked in an era when social pressures required them to hide their true orientation or identity, making their achievements all the more fitting for celebration today. The article profiles these individuals chronologically by birthdate, showcasing their groundbreaking work in areas such as mathematics, computer programming, artificial intelligence, and microelectronics chip design. By highlighting their stories, the article aims to promote awareness and appreciation of the important contributions made by LGBTQI+ individuals in the field of computer science.

In celebration of Gay Pride and the Stonewall anniversary, the blog highlights notable LGBTQI+ pioneers in computer science whose contributions have significantly shaped modern technology. Beyond well-known figures like Alan Turing and Tim Cook, the text profiles individuals such as Sofia Kovalevskaya, the first major Russian female mathematician; Christopher Strachey, a developer of early computer music programs and programming languages; Peter Landin, a mathematician whose work influenced universal programming languages; Edith Windsor, a prominent gay rights activist and IBM engineer; Lynn Conway, a microelectronics design pioneer; Jon Hall, a Linux advocate; Sophie Wilson, an ARM processor developer; Mary Ann Horton, a Usenet pioneer and transgender rights advocate; and Audrey Tang, a Taiwanese programming prodigy and political activist. These individuals often navigated societal challenges related to their identity, underscoring the importance of recognizing their contributions today.

New Relic has introduced several innovations to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) for detecting, diagnosing, and mitigating issues faster, known as AIOps. The company's expanded anomaly detection allows for smarter, easier alerting and issue mapping, providing context and analysis needed to quickly understand and mitigate issues. Intelligent detection can now be applied to nearly any entity in New Relic with just a few clicks, reducing mean time to detect (MTTD). Additionally, the company has introduced dynamic baseline alerting, which allows for easy creation of custom alert conditions that cover all services and infrastructure, making it easier for teams to add alert coverage. The new features also include issue maps, incident analysis, and recommendations for relevant dashboards, providing context and insights needed to solve issues quickly.

New Relic has introduced custom visualizations allowing users to build unique chart widgets with React.js and pull in telemetry data from various sources, pin them to dashboards, and use open source charting libraries like Victory. The company partnered with Formidable to integrate charts directly into the New Relic catalog, making it easy for users to access pre-built custom charts without needing to edit code or configure JSON files. Three new chart types are available: stacked bar chart, range chart, and circular progress bar, with more to come as part of an ongoing partnership. Users can easily add these charts to their dashboards by following a simple process outlined in the New Relic platform, and explore additional resources for customizing and building custom visualizations.

New Relic has partnered with Formidable to enhance its customizable visualization capabilities by integrating Formidable's Victory charting library into the New Relic platform, allowing users to create bespoke data visualizations with ease. This collaboration enables users to add pre-built custom charts to their dashboards without needing to manually edit code, offering new chart types such as stacked bar charts, range charts, and circular progress bars. The initiative aims to make data visualization more accessible by providing templates that can be easily adapted and expanded upon, fostering an open-source environment for further customization. This development aligns with New Relic's commitment to open-source innovation and enhancing user experience by enabling customers to effectively visualize and communicate their data.

At FutureStack 2021, New Relic announced several innovations in the application of AI and ML to IT operations, known as AIOps, aimed at enhancing issue detection and mitigation before customer impact. These include expanded anomaly detection allowing users to identify problems across various entities with ease, and dynamic baseline alerting that uses dynamic thresholds to accommodate changes in business services and infrastructure. New Relic Applied Intelligence introduces tools like Issue Maps and Incident Analysis to streamline root cause identification by correlating incidents and providing enriched contextual information. Additionally, the platform offers recommendations for relevant dashboards to enhance problem-solving efficiency, and these features are integrated into New Relic One for a seamless user experience.

The NewRelic.org Observability for Good program provides free and discounted technology and support services to nonprofits, NGOs, and charities worldwide. The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and may not reflect New Relic's official stance. Solutions offered are environment-specific and not part of commercial solutions or support. For questions and support related to this post, please visit the Explorers Hub at discuss.newrelic.com, where you can also find links to third-party sites that New Relic does not endorse.

Nonprofits, NGOs, and charities around the world can benefit from the Observability for Good program offered by NewRelic.org, which provides access to free and discounted technology and support services. Matt Shandera, who serves as New Relic's Customer Adoption Director and Chief of Staff to the Chief Customer Officer, is dedicated to helping these organizations leverage technology to advance their missions. With a background in nonprofit leadership, Matt is passionate about enhancing problem-solving through better observability. His views, expressed in the blog, do not necessarily reflect those of New Relic, and any solutions mentioned are specific to certain environments, not included in New Relic's commercial offerings. Readers are encouraged to visit the Explorers Hub for questions and support, while New Relic disclaims endorsement of third-party content linked in the blog.

New Relic has released regex capture, a feature that allows users to query and extract useful data from strings such as URLs, log messages, and more using regular expressions in New Relic Query Language (NRQL). This feature makes it easier to query and extract focused data from strings, allowing users to find specific data points and gain insights into their tech stack. With regex capture, users can use the `capture` function to extract data from strings, including account IDs within URL paths. The feature is available in NRQL and can be used in various clauses such as SELECT, WHERE, and FACET. By using regex capture, users can discover new insights on their data and improve their queries.

New Relic has introduced a new regex capture feature to enhance querying capabilities within the New Relic Query Language (NRQL), addressing challenges associated with extracting data from URLs and other string attributes. Previously, querying such data required specific instrumentation, but the new capture function allows users to employ regular expressions to extract specific data points, such as account IDs within URL paths, facilitating more nuanced data analysis. Regular expressions in NRQL are based on Re2 syntax, enabling users to define capture groups to extract focused data segments. This functionality simplifies the process of discovering valuable insights by allowing users to facet, filter, and count unique occurrences within their telemetry data, such as identifying accounts with the highest usage or those experiencing performance issues. The tool aims to improve data analysis by making it easier to find patterns and extract meaningful information from complex datasets.

New Relic is introducing Errors Inbox, a tool designed to help developers proactively track and fix errors before they impact customers. It allows for a single view of all error notifications across the full stack, including APM, RUM, Mobile, Serverless, and more. This enables teams to group similar errors together, triage them easily, and communicate across teams about critical issues. With Errors Inbox, developers can receive notifications in Slack, create workloads for targeted monitoring, and track errors before they hit production. The tool is included in the Full Stack Observability license and offers a streamlined process for error tracking, collaboration, and communication.

New Relic has introduced Errors Inbox, a tool aimed at helping developers proactively manage and triage errors across their entire stack, minimizing the time spent on last-minute error investigations. This tool consolidates error notifications from various sources like APM, RUM, Mobile, and Serverless monitors into a single interface, allowing for efficient error tracking, grouping, and triaging. It also integrates with Slack for seamless communication and enables teams to collaborate effectively by grouping related errors and maintaining a history of error discussions. Errors Inbox supports proactive error management by allowing developers to set up workloads for different environments, helping catch issues before they impact production. This tool aims to improve developers' efficiency and enhance customer experience by enabling more effective error management.

The New Relic Lambda extension allows direct access to AWS Lambda log streams, enabling users to manage and optimize cloud spend without compromising observability. The extension collects, enhances, and transports telemetry data from Lambda functions to New Relic One's Telemetry Data Platform. It overcomes challenges such as latency and cost concerns by buffering telemetry and sending it periodically. The extension also provides metadata decoration, allowing users to maintain a record of their function's state as it was invoked, rather than as it is today. This enables slicing and dicing event data by function metadata in custom queries, dashboards, or NRQL alerts.

New Relic's integration with AWS Lambda Extensions provides engineers with the ability to directly access AWS Lambda log streams, bypassing Amazon CloudWatch, to manage cloud expenses while maintaining observability. This integration allows users to collect, enhance, and transport telemetry data directly to New Relic One's Telemetry Data Platform, offering deeper insights into AWS Lambda functions. The New Relic Lambda extension functions as a lightweight tool that operates within the Lambda execution environment to buffer and periodically send telemetry data, overcoming previous challenges associated with using CloudWatch. By utilizing AWS Secrets Manager for license key management, the extension ensures efficient telemetry data handling and minimizes AWS costs. Additionally, metadata decoration enriches the telemetry data with function configuration details, enabling advanced data querying and analysis in New Relic One. Overall, the extension allows users to observe and understand the performance of their serverless applications while optimizing their cloud spend.

Juneteenth commemorates the date when Major-General Gordon Granger officially freed the enslaved in Galveston, Texas, with General Orders No. 3, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The day marks a significant event in US history as it was initially unknown to many enslaved people that their freedom had been secured due to the geographical isolation of Texas during the Civil War. Juneteenth has become a celebration of strength, sacrifice, and contributions made by African Americans, with traditions carried over from the "scatter" period after emancipation, where formerly enslaved individuals went in search of lost loved ones or built new lives elsewhere. The holiday has been recognized as a state holiday in Texas since 1980 and is now being considered for federal recognition, with a resolution passed by both the Senate and House of Representatives awaiting President Biden's signature to make it an official federal holiday.

At FutureStack 2021, we launched Next-Gen AIOps, a product that empowers users to detect, diagnose, and mitigate issues in their data-driven environments. With Next-Gen AIOps, users can easily detect anomalies using expanded anomaly detection and dynamic baselines for intelligent alerting. The platform also provides issue maps, incident analysis, and machine learning-powered dashboards to help teams respond quickly and intelligently to incidents and improve customer experiences.

At FutureStack 2021, New Relic introduced Next-Gen AIOps, a suite of tools designed to enhance data-driven decision-making and deliver intelligent, proactive experiences efficiently. The new features include expanded anomaly detection, dynamic baselines for intelligent alerting, and NRQL query-based contextual alerts. Users can visualize entity relationships and assess issue scopes using issue maps while incident analysis provides detailed insights into incidents. These innovations aim to help teams quickly and intelligently respond to incidents, thus improving customer experiences. Nate Heinrich, Principal Product Manager at New Relic, provides a detailed explanation of these features in a Nerdlog episode, inviting users to explore further through on-demand sessions, discussions, and interactive demonstrations.

Juneteenth, recognized as a day of remembrance and celebration for African Americans, marks the day enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom on June 19, 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. This day, also known as Emancipation Day, highlights the resilience and contributions of enslaved ancestors, with celebrations historically including parades, cookouts, and cultural events. Despite nearly fading due to Jim Crow laws, Juneteenth was revived during the civil rights movement and became a Texas state holiday in 1980, with 47 other states and D.C. also recognizing it. The U.S. Senate and House have passed a resolution to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday, awaiting the President's signature. The author, KC Green, encourages readers to reflect on Juneteenth's significance and consider supporting human rights and equality efforts.

New Relic's EC2 integration enables observability and monitoring of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, addressing the challenges of setting up custom monitoring solutions. By automating the process of installing the infrastructure agent, New Relic simplifies observability for customers running workloads on EC2, providing benefits such as cost savings, business agility, operational resilience, and staff productivity. The integration also enables contextually monitoring workloads running on instances, using agent-based instances and application performance management (APM). Additionally, New Relic offers an AWS Quick Start solution that automates observability for customers planning to run or already running workloads on EC2, providing a production-ready, automated reference solution built by AWS solutions architects and partners. This solution enables automatic monitoring of instances at scale, across multiple AWS Regions and accounts, with flexibility in choosing instances to monitor using tags. It also provides enriched EC2 telemetry, faster MTTR, and helps customers build AWS Well-Architured EC2 instances that meet operational excellence, performance efficiency, and cost optimization goals.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a widely used compute platform offering various configuration options, and New Relic provides an EC2 integration to enhance observability through automated monitoring. This integration, resulting from a strategic partnership with AWS, simplifies the process of monitoring EC2 instances by installing a lightweight infrastructure agent that collects and forwards telemetry data, which can be customized based on user needs. The AWS Quick Start solution for New Relic's EC2 integration allows for automatic, scalable monitoring from the moment instances are launched, utilizing AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks to provide a seamless experience across multiple regions and accounts. New Relic's tools, such as New Relic Explorer and Navigator, offer comprehensive and intuitive views of instances' health, facilitating faster troubleshooting and incident resolution. Additionally, New Relic provides insights into cost optimization by identifying instances that can be rightsized, contributing to operational efficiency and cost savings in line with AWS Well-Architected goals.

We can learn about Workiva's adoption of New Relic One as their observability platform by exploring their stories at Our Customers. At Workiva, data is core to everything they do and ensuring applications meet customer expectations starts in their platform operations organization where they deliver critical daily applications. They had a homegrown tool for synthetic monitoring but wanted to simplify their toolset so engineers could get a complete picture across all systems. To achieve this, they formed an observability team with the goal of adopting a unified platform, selecting New Relic One due to its comprehensive features and ability to build custom apps. By building apps with New Relic One, Workiva can get more granular views with less time and effort than manually building dashboards, enabling them to increase uptime for customers. They're now working on feeding data into a system that will automatically alert their on-call engineers if something went wrong, increasing operational efficiency and reducing toil as they continue to deliver new tools relying heavily on New Relic One's programmable platform.

As Pride month approaches, a company's CEO reflects on how proud they are to work for an organization that celebrates diversity and inclusivity, allowing them to bring their authentic self to work every day. The CEO shares their personal journey of coming out and the importance of having LGBTQI+ role models in the workplace, which led to better relationships with colleagues and a stronger sense of belonging. They argue that organizations cannot serve their customers effectively if they don't understand their diversity, highlighting the need for representation across all levels of the business. The CEO also shares how their company's core values encourage authenticity, leading to a culture where employees can be their most authentic selves, both in work and home life. The organization is supporting Pride month with initiatives such as a Pride Fund that matches donations from employees to LGBTQIA+ organizations.

Reflecting on his journey as an LGBTQI+ executive, Greg Perotto shares the importance of authenticity and diversity in the workplace, highlighting how being able to bring his true self to work has enhanced his leadership and collaboration skills. Despite initial challenges in his career due to fear of discrimination, Perotto found empowerment through role models and supportive work environments, eventually becoming a leader who advocates for inclusion and diversity. At New Relic, he emphasizes the company's commitment to fostering an inclusive culture where employees are encouraged to celebrate their unique identities, not just during Pride month but year-round. Perotto also highlights New Relic's initiatives, such as the Pride Fund, which supports organizations that assist the LGBTQIA+ community, and underscores the broader impact of diversity in understanding and serving customers effectively.

Workiva has enhanced its operational efficiency and observability by adopting New Relic One as a unified platform to monitor its AWS-based services and applications, aiming to simplify toolsets and provide comprehensive system insights. The observability team, established 18 months ago, guides this transition to ensure effective monitoring and reporting, leveraging New Relic's capabilities to extend and customize applications for unique needs. Custom-built apps enable granular monitoring of service availability, AWS, and Kubernetes resources, integrating these insights into KPI reports for executive leadership. These tools, coupled with smoke tests and a testing suite, improve uptime and operational efficiency by allowing rapid issue identification and resolution. Workiva is also exploring further applications, such as New Relic One Cloud Optimize for cost tracking and integrating the New Relic Terraform Provider to streamline CI/CD processes. Looking ahead, Workiva plans to expand the use of New Relic One to enhance customer experience by further leveraging its programmable platform.

New Relic has released two new innovations: New Relic Errors Inbox and New Relic Student Edition. The former is a tool that allows users to track and triage all errors from a single view, providing rich, correlated data across the application stack. This helps users detect, prioritize, and take action on all errors in one place, before they affect customer experiences. The latter is a packaged offering available for free to students and teachers, which provides hands-on experience with observability tools and helps them learn in-demand tech skills. Both innovations aim to improve how engineers build, deploy, and optimize software, and are part of New Relic's efforts to empower the next generation of engineers and developers.

At FutureStack 2021, New Relic introduced two key innovations: New Relic Errors Inbox and New Relic Student Edition. The Errors Inbox is designed to help engineers proactively track and manage software errors by providing a unified view of data from various application components, facilitating easier detection, prioritization, and resolution of issues without leaving the New Relic One platform. It enhances collaboration among teams with shared comments and detailed error grouping. Meanwhile, the Student Edition aims to equip students and teachers with practical experience in observability tools and valuable tech skills, available for free to foster the next generation of tech professionals. The event also featured over 50 interactive sessions, a 24-hour hackathon, and live music, underscoring New Relic's commitment to advancing software observability and education in tech.

The winner of Best Hack in the FutureHack 2021 "Hack for Good" track was Community Tech, led by Monica Flores and Giesha Nuñez, who created a lightweight Mutual Aid Network app that received $5,000 to further develop its ideas. The idea for the app arose from the need for informal mutual aid networks during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Washington, D.C., where people came together to help neighbors without expecting payment or reward. Monica Flores thought there might be ways to help manage the flow of requests in a community and created an MVP version of a Mutual Aid Network online using tools such as Drupal 9, Pantheon hosting environment, and contributed modules like Flag. The app allows users to create requests, categorize them, and assign them to volunteers, with all activity being self-reported. Monica Flores used various tools including Terminal, Sublime Text editor, Google Docs, and New Relic One dashboard to build the app within a 24-hour timeframe. The project aims to make a positive impact on communities by utilizing open-source solutions and co-creating the future with available resources.

Community Tech, comprising Monica Flores and Giesha Nuñez, won the Best Hack in the Hack for Good track at FutureHack 2021 for creating a Mutual Aid Network app designed to facilitate neighborly support within communities. Inspired by the spontaneous mutual aid networks that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, the app aims to streamline requests for assistance, such as grocery deliveries or eldercare, by categorizing and managing them in a self-organizing, time-bound, and filterable manner. Developed in a 24-hour hackathon using tools like Drupal, Pantheon, and New Relic for monitoring, the app's prototype showcases how technology can support community-driven solutions. The project highlights the potential for open-source technology and collaborative efforts to address local needs effectively, and the team's next steps include refining the app and possibly launching it beyond the pilot version.

DeltaBlue, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, has integrated its virtualization-agnostic platform with New Relic's One platform to provide customers with real-time performance monitoring and analytics. This integration allows DeltaBlue customers to track application response time, database load, and frontend data to gain insights into user experience and make informed decisions on capacity management. The integration is designed to be seamless, allowing customers to reuse their existing New Relic accounts or have a new one automatically created through the DeltaBlue portal, with no additional hassle or financial burden.

DeltaBlue, a platform-as-a-service provider, offers a virtualization-agnostic platform that supports containers, VMs, and bare metal, allowing users to run Kubernetes on top of their platform. The platform is API-driven and features a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, enabling users to manage configurations, network infrastructure, and conduct application cloning and snapshots. DeltaBlue integrates with several partners, including the Dutch AIOps startup Vamp, to facilitate canary releases for web-based applications, allowing versions to be linked to different Git branches and targeted to specific user groups. The integration with New Relic further enhances DeltaBlue's capabilities by providing telemetry data to assess application performance and user perception, aiding in capacity management and traffic control. The seamless integration with New Relic allows DeltaBlue customers to manage both their DeltaBlue and New Relic accounts effortlessly, with options for reusing existing accounts or creating new ones automatically. The implementation of this feature was completed in a short timeframe, with the most significant challenge being the alignment of service level agreements. DeltaBlue's integration with New Relic has been well-received by customers, who value the convenience of addressing performance issues from a single platform.

Security incidents and cyber-attacks are predicted to cost the world $9.5 trillion in 2024 and climb to over $13 trillion by 2028. Observability is key for bridging development and production insights, helping in early detection and prevention of security vulnerabilities. The MELT framework provides a comprehensive approach to security observability, combining metrics, events, logs, and traces. Data visualizations help identify normal and abnormal patterns, while machine learning and AI tools allow proactive deal with cybersecurity incidents. Observability can help address authentication, access control, brute force attacks, and external dependency vulnerabilities. It enhances incident response, threat modeling, vulnerability management, and security posture assessment, providing visibility into proactive security actions and reactive security investigations to better understand vulnerabilities in applications. By incorporating security observability, companies can proactively monitor their application and improve their security posture using tools like New Relic.