April 2022 Summaries

The European open banking ecosystem allows fintech companies to innovate and create targeted apps and products that go beyond traditional bank offerings. Regulatory safeguards and security are built into the ecosystem, with third-party providers needing to be accredited by registering with national financial authorities. The right of consumer consent means that consumers can remove or give consent at any time. Fintech applications must gain approval from banks before being released. Increasing consumer consent via authentication and authorization is crucial, with Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements protecting consumers against fraud during the authentication process. Fintech companies need to follow best practices such as creating tiered access, explaining intentions clearly, and enabling time limitations to ensure customers fully agree to link their bank accounts in an application. Measuring consent workflows can provide insights into customer experience and help build trust with app users. The success rate of connecting a bank account to an app is important, as well as API response rates, consent exit points, and usage and activity rates, which can all impact customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Europe's open banking initiatives, mandated by the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and UK Open Banking regulations, have facilitated the integration of fintech applications with customer bank accounts by requiring banks to provide APIs for payment and account information. This regulatory framework encourages innovation beyond traditional banking services while ensuring security through standardized API templates and technical guidelines. Fintech companies must be accredited and use regulatory sandboxes for testing, and they must obtain consumer consent for data use, which can be revoked or modified at any time. The PSD2 requires Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) to protect consumers against fraud, necessitating two out of three elements: knowledge, possession, and inherence. Best practices for facilitating customer consent include tiered access, clear communication of data use intentions, and time limitations, with measurements of consent workflows providing insights into customer experience. Additionally, monitoring success rates, API response and performance rates, consent exit points, and usage activity helps improve user experience, while tools like New Relic offer real-time insights into optimizing customer journeys.

The Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Blueprints framework is being enhanced with a new add-on that allows for easy deployment of New Relic's observability components using code instead of manual instrumentation, making it simpler to monitor EKS clusters. This add-on enables users to deploy Pixie, an eBPF-based observability component, with no additional setup required. With this integration, users can correlate their services' golden signals with Kubernetes infrastructure and access container logs in one click, minimizing the time spent detecting and diagnosing issues. The add-on is designed to provide deep visibility into the performance of EKS clusters, making it an essential tool for DevOps shops and mature development teams looking to manage, secure, and automate their development platforms.

New Relic Instant Observability (I/O) is an open ecosystem of over 450 free, prebuilt quickstarts that help developers start monitoring their systems in minutes. This platform helps combat tool sprawl and data silos by partnering with leading technology companies to build integrations for a single observability platform. New partner integrations include Cloudflare Network Logs, Netlify Logs, Postman, Datazoom, and Glassbox, which provide end-to-end visibility into system health, web traffic metrics, API performance, video data, and digital experiences. These integrations enable developers to visualize, monitor, and act on all their data in a single platform, making it easier to gain end-to-end observability.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) aids in managing Kubernetes clusters, but monitoring remains crucial to ensure optimal performance and troubleshoot issues. The new add-on for the Amazon EKS Blueprints framework, leveraging the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), simplifies monitoring by integrating New Relic's observability components, facilitating easier deployment of Kubernetes observability tools. This integration allows users to correlate service metrics with Kubernetes infrastructure and quickly access logs, enhancing issue detection and resolution. EKS Blueprints provide predefined templates that incorporate best practices for security and scalability, easing the setup and management of EKS clusters. Effective monitoring involves using tools like CloudWatch, Prometheus, and New Relic to track resource usage and application performance, set up alerts, and maintain dashboards for cluster health. The add-on for EKS Blueprints offers deep visibility into cluster performance, supporting both new users and experienced DevOps teams in managing, securing, and automating development platforms.

New Relic has expanded its observability platform by introducing new partner integrations with companies like Cloudflare, Netlify, Postman, Datazoom, and Glassbox, available through New Relic Instant Observability (I/O), an open ecosystem of over 450 free, prebuilt quickstarts. These integrations aim to simplify monitoring by providing essential tools for instrumenting, monitoring, and acting on telemetry data across various domains such as customer experience, web performance, and API management. For instance, the Cloudflare Logpush integration enables faster log delivery without cloud storage middleware costs, while the Netlify Logs quickstart allows developers to analyze traffic and function logs efficiently. The Postman integration offers real-time API metrics for better collaboration, and Datazoom focuses on video metrics to enhance streaming video insights. Additionally, Glassbox provides digital experience analytics for improving user journeys. These enhancements are designed to address tool sprawl and data silos, offering a more unified and efficient monitoring experience through New Relic's platform.

Prometheus is a powerful open-source tool for real-time monitoring of applications, microservices, and networks, including service meshes and proxies. It offers a dimensional data model, a powerful query language, and high scalability, making it an ideal choice for container orchestration, microservices architectures, cloud-native applications, and infrastructure monitoring. Prometheus collects metrics data from its targets using a pull model over HTTP and supports various exporters to monitor different applications and systems. The tool also integrates seamlessly with Grafana for visualization and observability platforms like New Relic. With its flexible query language and multidimensional model, Prometheus provides real-time insights into system performance, enabling proactive issue resolution and efficient resource utilization.

CoreDNS is an open-source DNS server that translates domain names into IP addresses in cloud-native environments. It uses a customizable plugin-based architecture and provides valuable logs for system health insights. Monitoring CoreDNS with Prometheus and New Relic can help mitigate risks, ensure stability, and identify performance issues. Key metrics to monitor include cache hits and misses, error rates, Go metrics, performance metrics, scaling and resource metrics, and throughput metrics. Visualizing these metrics can provide real-time insights into CoreDNS's performance and help administrators troubleshoot issues quickly. New Relic offers a powerful solution for monitoring CoreDNS with its CoreDNS quickstart, providing seamless integration and free account offerings. By sending Prometheus data to New Relic, users can simplify data management and focus on innovation.

CoreDNS, the default DNS server for Kubernetes v1.23+, is crucial for service discovery and name resolution, but its malfunction can lead to significant outages in Kubernetes clusters. Monitoring CoreDNS with tools like Prometheus and New Relic is essential to ensure system stability, as these platforms provide insights into CoreDNS performance through metrics such as cache efficiency, error rates, query response times, and resource utilization. CoreDNS operates as a customizable, open-source DNS server that translates domain names into IP addresses using a plugin-based architecture, and its logs offer valuable information on system health and performance. To prevent disruptions, it's important to keep track of various metrics, including cache hits and misses, DNS query throughput, and error codes, with New Relic offering seamless integration for managing Prometheus data. Effective CoreDNS monitoring is critical for maintaining the functionality of Kubernetes clusters, and New Relic's CoreDNS quickstart provides a robust solution for visualizing performance data and troubleshooting issues, enabling users to focus on innovation while managing data efficiently.

OpenTelemetry's metrics capabilities have been stabilized and are now available as release candidates, marking an important milestone in the project's evolution. The OpenTelemetry community has made significant progress in recent times, introducing new practices to build modern observability solutions. However, adopting OpenTelemetry at scale can be daunting due to its relatively new status and evolving nature. To support your organization's OpenTelemetry initiatives, it is essential to understand the current state of core components, evaluate language client SDKs for maturity, and consider limitations such as manual instrumentation and sampling methodologies. The New Relic platform provides a suitable backend for OpenTelemetry, offering flexibility, breadth, pricing control, compliance, and contributions to the OpenTelemetry project. Building a solid plan for adopting OpenTelemetry involves focusing on observability goals, developing project objectives with key stakeholders, and understanding current limitations while leveraging mixed instrumentation capabilities.

OpenTelemetry, a rapidly evolving open-source observability project, recently achieved a significant milestone with the stabilization of its metrics capabilities, marking an important step for the software development and site reliability engineering communities in enhancing application observability. The project comprises various components including APIs, SDKs, and protocols, which are at different stages of maturity across languages like Java, .NET, and Go, with tracing being the most developed. While OpenTelemetry offers a standardized approach to generate telemetry signals such as traces, metrics, and logs, it is not a standalone observability platform and requires integration with platforms like New Relic for data analysis and visualization. Adoption of OpenTelemetry can be complex due to its novelty and diverse implementation statuses, necessitating careful planning and consideration of project goals, instrumentation methods, and architecture decisions to ensure effective deployment and utilization. As the project continues to mature, particularly in its metrics and logging capabilities, organizations are encouraged to adopt a phased approach and leverage platforms that support OpenTelemetry to maximize the benefits of observability.

New Relic browser monitoring provides actionable metrics for frontend, full-stack, and web developers to measure and improve application performance and end-user responsiveness. The latest updates include industry-standard Google Web Vitals, allowing users to easily troubleshoot and optimize their front-end applications without building custom dashboards. With the new features, users can immediately visualize and analyze critical metrics such as largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and keeping a finger on key performance metrics. Additionally, users can view user traffic across devices, filter by device type, operating system, and country, and identify worst performing pages, making it easier to debug and optimize front-end experiences without coding required.

The text discusses using Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools like GORM in Go applications and how to use the New Relic Go agent to monitor performance expectations. The New Relic Go agent is an SDK that enables tracing and observation of a Go application, allowing developers to manually instrument their code and monitor database transactions. The article provides a step-by-step guide on configuring the New Relic Go agent, importing instrumented database drivers, and starting transaction traces in GORM applications. It also explains how to collect and analyze data using New Relic's UI, including visualization of database transactions and statistics like response time and throughput. The goal is to help developers understand their application's performance and identify areas for improvement.

Object-relational mapping (ORM) tools serve as an abstraction layer between databases and programming languages, improving code readability and reducing its footprint by representing database transactions as code rather than explicit queries. In the Go community, GORM is a popular ORM due to its developer-friendly design and extensive features. To monitor performance expectations when using GORM, the New Relic Go agent can be employed to instrument and observe Go applications within New Relic. By integrating New Relic's SDK with GORM, developers can manually trace and monitor database transactions, utilizing features such as distributed tracing for a more detailed analysis. The setup includes using New Relic instrumented database drivers and configuring the Go agent with license keys, debugging options, and distributed tracing capabilities. This integration provides insights into metrics like response time, throughput, CPU utilization, and memory usage, offering a comprehensive view of application performance and database transaction costs.

FutureStack 2022 is a premier event for software engineers and developers to learn from peers, network, and work on solutions to pressing DevOps issues with New Relic product experts and peers. The event includes presentations from various companies using New Relic, live events, and hands-on training sessions. It also features a keynote with Silicon Valley icon Steve Wosniak, comedian Ronny Chieng's stand-up comedy performance, and a 24-hour hackathon with prizes. Attendees can expect to learn about new product innovations, meet industry experts, and network with over 750 attendees in person at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. Early bird registration prices are available until May 6.

FutureStack 2022, held from May 17-19 in Las Vegas, promises to be an engaging event for software engineers and developers, featuring in-person networking opportunities, presentations from prominent companies like Verizon and IBM, and the chance to learn directly from New Relic experts. Attendees will benefit from a range of activities, including over 50 breakout sessions on observability best practices, hands-on workshops, and a hackathon with substantial prizes. Keynote speakers such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and NASA's Dr. Moogega Cooper will share insights, while comedian Ronny Chieng is set to entertain. The event also includes the latest product announcements from New Relic, and early bird registration is encouraged for those looking to secure a spot at this anticipated gathering.

The importance of performance in user experience cannot be overstated, as it directly impacts how users interact with an application. Measuring and optimizing performance is crucial to delivering a good user experience. Developers have the power to affect UX by focusing on user-centric metrics such as largest contentful paint, which measures the time from when a user navigates to a page until the largest image or block of content loads. Partitioning data by device, region, product, and user journey can help identify areas where performance may vary, allowing for targeted optimization efforts. By focusing on these key metrics and taking action to improve them, developers can maximize returns on site design and navigation, ultimately driving better user engagement and experiences.

User experience (UX) is significantly influenced by performance, as even the most innovative designs can fail if a site is slow or prone to errors. Developers play a crucial role in shaping UX by optimizing application performance, which can be measured beyond basic health metrics by focusing on user-centric indicators like Google's Core Web Vitals. These metrics, such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), are crucial for understanding how performance affects user engagement, particularly when analyzed across different devices and parts of the user journey. For instance, slow LCP on mobile devices can lead to user frustration, even if desktop performance appears adequate. By partitioning data based on device, region, and specific user journey stages, businesses can identify and address performance bottlenecks that might not be visible in average metrics. This approach helps improve the digital customer experience, as outlined in New Relic's guidelines, which emphasize the importance of focusing on user experience metrics to enhance site performance and user satisfaction.

New Relic has released a next-generation runtime for synthetic monitoring, which includes updated features and functionalities to test user flows in production environments and detect performance issues before they impact end-users' experience. The new runtime supports the latest version of Chrome (version 100) and unlocks testing of modern applications requiring newer Chrome versions. It also introduces improved synthetic runtime capabilities, including async/await support, a custom timing library, and customizable scripted monitor types that cover additional protocols. Additionally, New Relic is introducing NerdGraph API to manage all monitor types, secure credentials, and private locations, making it easier to simplify workflow and track application performance. The update aims to minimize changes needed for users to migrate their current monitors and provides a quick migration process through the new runtime or NerdGraph API.

New Relic has announced the release of a next-generation runtime for synthetic monitoring, designed to proactively test application flows and address performance issues before they impact users. This updated runtime supports the latest Chrome version, making browser updates more seamless and frequent, and it introduces features like an improved synthetic runtime using the got Node request module, async/await support, and a custom timing library. These enhancements allow for more efficient management of asynchronous code and testing of modern applications. Users can manage monitor types, secure credentials, and private locations using the NerdGraph API, streamlining workflows by minimizing API calls. The update is designed to minimize changes required when upgrading current monitors, with migration facilitated through a simple dropdown or the NerdGraph API. New IP addresses for public locations ensure application availability, and comprehensive documentation supports the transition to the new runtime.

Istio is an open-source service mesh that uses Kubernetes to help connect, monitor, and secure microservices. It provides a flexible way to manage and monitor network traffic, but can be challenging to scale and analyze data. Istio uses Prometheus to report data from its service mesh, which can be difficult to process and visualize. To overcome these challenges, Istio's users can send their Prometheus metrics to New Relic, making it easier to find and fix issues when something goes wrong. By monitoring key metrics such as request rates, success rates, latency, error rates, and resource utilization, users can gain insights into the performance of their microservices architecture. Additionally, Istio provides a range of features for monitoring traffic routing and load balancing, as well as alerting and notification systems to help users stay on top of system health. By leveraging New Relic's Prometheus OpenMetrics Integration or Remote Write integration, users can simplify their data management and focus on innovation.

New Relic has achieved HITRUST certification, making it the industry's first HIPAA-compliant observability platform that can monitor all telemetry data, including PHI, across the entire software stack. This allows healthcare organizations to improve patient experiences by monitoring application and infrastructure performance in a secure environment. With New Relic One, IT engineers can access a single source of truth for their telemetry data, enabling them to troubleshoot issues quickly and mitigate problems before they affect patients. The platform provides full-stack analysis tools and applied intelligence capabilities, delivered at an industry-leading price. By achieving HIPAA compliance, New Relic empowers healthcare organizations to put patient security first and protect sensitive information while improving patient outcomes.

New Relic has launched the industry's first HIPAA-compliant observability platform, now also achieving HITRUST certification, allowing healthcare organizations to monitor application and infrastructure performance for systems containing Protected Health Information (PHI). The platform, New Relic One, offers a comprehensive view of all telemetry data, including metrics, events, logs, and distributed traces, across the entire software stack. It provides IT engineers in healthcare, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and biotech with a single source of truth, enabling them to act on telemetry data efficiently while ensuring data protection and security. By signing Business Associate Agreements, New Relic allows organizations to improve patient, provider, and partner experiences, with its engineering teams ensuring patient data confidentiality and privacy through industry-standard security measures. The platform aims to address both the unique challenges of the healthcare sector and the technological demands shared with other industries, offering solutions to monitor and resolve performance issues across diverse technology environments.

Istio is an open-source service mesh that enhances the connectivity, monitoring, and security of microservices using Kubernetes, allowing for seamless migration of services without the need to rewrite applications. The system requires multiple Envoy proxies per service, which can complicate management and monitoring, but leveraging tools like Prometheus and New Relic can simplify performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Prometheus provides various metrics such as request volume, request duration, server error rates, and network interactions, which are crucial for assessing microservices' performance and stability. New Relic's integration with Prometheus offers an efficient way to scale and analyze data, eliminating the need to maintain a Prometheus infrastructure by automatically importing data and providing insights through visualizations and queries. Effective Istio monitoring involves setting clear objectives, focusing on key metrics like error rates and latency, and implementing a proactive approach to alerts and configuration tuning. New Relic's solutions facilitate comprehensive observability and proactive issue identification, allowing users to focus on innovation while managing data efficiently.

New Relic CodeStream is an integrated development environment (IDE) extension that provides real-time performance data and code-level metrics to accelerate release cadence and improve software quality. It allows developers to troubleshoot applications without compromising daily development practice, giving them crucial telemetry data at the most granular level. By integrating observability for development workflows, New Relic CodeStream enables engineers to identify issues faster, optimize their development lifecycle, and shift to data-driven code reviews. With this tool, teams can increase engineering velocity, improve code quality, and reduce reliance on IT/Ops teams to report issues.

This is a tutorial on automating common DevOps tasks in New Relic, focusing on exporting dashboards using the NerdGraph API and Python. The tutorial requires prerequisites such as Python 3 installed, a New Relic account, an instrumented application, and an API key. It covers how to export dashboards as PDF and PNG files using NRQL and the NerdGraph API, with example code provided. The tutorial is part of a five-part series on automating DevOps tasks in New Relic.

Part four of a five-part series on automating DevOps tasks in New Relic explains how to export dashboards for management reporting using Python and the NerdGraph API, a GraphQL-format API. It guides users through exporting dashboards as PDF or PNG files by providing sample Python code, which makes API calls using the requests and json modules. The tutorial also details the prerequisites needed, such as having Python 3, a New Relic account, an API key, and an application instrumented with New Relic APM. The series aims to integrate DevOps into observability practices and encourages users to explore further possibilities with the NerdGraph API while offering insights from Steve Ng, a senior manager at New Relic.

BASF, a leading chemistry company, aimed to streamline and automate monitoring of its applications and application environment. After exploring various options, they chose New Relic's observability platform to centralize their view across multiple clouds, provide real-time visibility into business KPIs, and detect performance issues before they affected users. With New Relic, BASF created a custom application, GAME Board, to monitor the health of its applications in one place, receive instant alerts when issues arise, and prioritize rapid responses. The platform also enabled cost tracking and optimization, allowing teams to make data-driven decisions. As BASF continues its observability journey, they plan to automate instrumentation using Terraform scripts, making it easier for product owners to monitor their applications.

The Digital Agriculture Solutions team at BASF has implemented New Relic's observability platform to streamline and automate the monitoring of hundreds of applications and cloud environments, creating a centralized system called the GAME Board. This initiative allows BASF to gain real-time insights into application health and business KPIs, offering visibility into server health, user activity, and infrastructure costs across multiple cloud services like Microsoft Azure and AWS. The GAME Board, developed in collaboration with New Relic engineers, provides instant alerts for any issues affecting applications, enabling rapid response before user experience is impacted. It also includes a cost-tracking dashboard to optimize infrastructure expenses, providing a transparent and scalable approach for product owners. The project is in its early stages, with plans to further automate the process using Terraform scripts, enhancing the ease of use for monitoring applications.

New Relic CodeStream has been launched with EU data center support, combining productivity and observability capabilities with error tracking functionality. The extension seamlessly integrates with tools like GitHub and GitLab to manage pull requests and start new branches from within the IDE. This integration streamlines error tracking, prioritization, and resolution, allowing teams to reduce technical debt and respond efficiently to critical errors. With CodeStream, users can view rich error data directly in their IDE, navigate stack traces, and collaborate with teammates on resolving issues, all while leveraging New Relic's observability capabilities. The tool also provides code-level metrics, collaboration features, and integrations with Jira, GitHub, and Slack, enabling teams to work more efficiently and effectively.

New Relic CodeStream, now available with EU data center support, integrates productivity and observability features with New Relic's error tracking solution, enhancing developer workflows by embedding error data directly into IDEs like VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains. This integration allows developers to manage pull requests, start new branches, and request code reviews within their IDE, while errors inbox provides detailed error data filtered according to the open code, facilitating seamless error tracking and resolution without needing to switch between different tools. By offering real-time insights and collaboration features, CodeStream helps technical teams reduce technical debt, prioritize and resolve errors efficiently, and build a comprehensive knowledge base over time. It integrates with popular tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and Slack, and now includes code-level metrics, enhancing app performance monitoring with rich data on golden signals.

Postman has integrated with New Relic API monitoring to provide a more comprehensive view of API performance and quality. The integration allows users to observe API performance in detail, including metrics such as CPU utilization, memory consumption, and database throughput. With this integration, developers can also get deeper pre-production API metrics down to the individual endpoint level, making it easier to debug performance issues in context. Additionally, Postman monitors the rest of the observability data at the same time, providing a unified visibility into API performance alongside application and infrastructure metrics. The integration is available to all Postman customers, including free-tier users, and can be set up for no additional cost.

The integration between Postman and New Relic offers an enhanced API monitoring solution, allowing developers to gain comprehensive insights into API performance and functionality. This collaboration provides a two-way integration where Postman monitors general observability data, while New Relic offers detailed pre-production API metrics at the endpoint level. It allows users to receive contextual deployment data from New Relic One within the Postman platform, enabling developers and engineers to access real-time application performance data where they work. Users benefit from unified visibility, advanced alerting capabilities, and the ability to debug performance issues by comparing API and full-stack metrics. The integration is available to all Postman customers, including those on the free tier, and New Relic offers a free account with 100 GB/month of free data ingest. The integration is designed to help developers start monitoring their APIs quickly and efficiently, with a pre-built dashboard available through New Relic's Instant Observability (I/O).

Today, we’re announcing that service levels are now generally available as part of New Relic One, providing cross-organizational teams with a common definition of reliability and enabling site reliability engineers, developers, IT admins, and business leaders to easily define, consume, and iterate on service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs).

New Relic One has made service level management generally available, enabling cross-organizational teams to define and manage service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) with ease. This feature allows site reliability engineers, developers, IT admins, and business leaders to collaborate on reliability definitions, utilize a recommendation engine for setup, and monitor compliance through operational views and reports. The platform facilitates the establishment of performance baselines and reliability benchmarks, promoting better incident management and compliance with service level agreements (SLAs). Users can benefit from automation and insights through tools like Terraform, enhancing operational efficiency and fostering a unified view of service reliability across applications, infrastructure, and teams. Feedback from users like Sportradar, Achievers, and Zip Co highlights the tool's impact on autonomy and reliability in their engineering practices. New Relic One offers a straightforward setup process, making it accessible for organizations to quickly implement service level management, with a free trial available for new users.

This post is part three of a five-part series on automating common DevOps tasks in New Relic using Python and the NerdGraph API. It shows how to export telemetry data for analysis, including using NRQL to query data on golden signals such as latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. The post provides examples of queries that can be used to extract specific metrics, such as average response time or rate of change, from New Relic data. To use these queries, users need to have a New Relic account, an instrumented application, and the necessary API key. The code for this example is provided in part one of the series, which can be found in the repository mentioned at the end of the post.

The third part of a five-part series on automating DevOps tasks in New Relic delves into exporting telemetry data using Python and the NerdGraph API, a GraphQL-format API that facilitates querying New Relic data. The post outlines steps for exporting data with New Relic Query Language (NRQL) and Python, emphasizing the importance of the Four Golden Signals—latency, traffic, errors, and saturation—as critical metrics for monitoring user-facing systems. It provides example queries for each signal type, illustrating how to group and analyze data over specified timeframes. The document also highlights prerequisites for following the tutorial, such as having Python 3 and a New Relic account, and offers a glimpse into the subsequent installment, which will focus on exporting dashboards for reporting. It underscores the role of Steve Ng, who focuses on various modern technologies and DevOps practices, and invites readers to engage further with New Relic through their Explorers Hub for questions and support.