June 2022 Summaries

The Zebrium Root Cause as a Service integration with New Relic automates the process of finding root causes of issues in logs, allowing engineers to identify problems more quickly and accurately without manual searching through logs. The integration provides a pre-built dashboard that includes incident detections, root cause details, and deep links to the Zebrium user interface, making it easier for teams to troubleshoot issues faster. With this integration, teams can reduce downtime and speed up resolution from hours to minutes, without needing to set up machine learning training or rules, and achieve correlation accuracy within 24 hours. The integration is available as part of New Relic's observability platform, which offers over 470 integrations and 100GB/month of free data ingest.

Zebrium's Root Cause as a Service (RCaaS) integrates with New Relic to streamline the process of identifying root causes of incidents in logs, which is increasingly complex due to the reliance on distributed microservices. This integration allows engineers to quickly locate the source of software or infrastructure problems without manually sifting through logs, reducing downtime and expediting issue resolution. The Zebrium quickstart in New Relic Instant Observability provides a pre-built dashboard displaying incident detections and root cause details, utilizing machine learning to analyze logs and identify anomalies with over 95% accuracy. Engineers can leverage this feature for free, with New Relic offering 100GB of monthly data ingest and unlimited basic users as part of its platform, thus alleviating the workload on SREs and DevOps teams. The setup process for this integration is designed to be quick, requiring only about 15 minutes, and does not necessitate manual machine learning training, making it accessible and efficient for users seeking to enhance their observability capabilities.

API governance is a set of policies, procedures, and practices to manage and control the usage, development, and maintenance of application programming interfaces (APIs) within an organization or across multiple organizations. It ensures that APIs are developed, deployed, and used in a consistent, secure, and efficient manner, aligning with the overall business objectives and regulatory requirements. Effective API governance helps streamline development efforts, enhance security and compliance, foster collaboration among teams, and drive innovation by enabling seamless integration and interoperability across systems and applications. It is essential for organizations that develop, maintain, and consume APIs, including enterprises, government agencies, software development companies, service providers, startups, developers, and integrators. By establishing clear API design guidelines, ensuring consistency across APIs, implementing robust security measures, enforcing compliance with standards and regulations, providing comprehensive documentation, and monitoring API performance and usage, organizations can establish effective API governance frameworks that maximize the value of their APIs while minimizing risks and ensuring compliance with relevant standards and regulations.

Authentication logs are records of events related to user authentication on a computer system, network, or application, typically containing information about login attempts, success or failure, and sometimes additional details such as the user's identity, IP address, and authentication method. Monitoring authentication logs is crucial for detecting security threats, login errors, trends, and compliance issues, as well as identifying potential vulnerabilities in third-party tools. Effective monitoring involves centralized logging, regular review, user behavior analytics, multi-factor authentication, log retention and archiving, access controls, and incident response planning. To make the most of authentication logs, it's essential to include relevant data such as who, what, when, how, and where, structured in a format like JSON for easier analysis, and visualize and analyze data using prebuilt dashboards like New Relic's observability platform.

API governance involves establishing policies, procedures, and practices to manage and control the usage, development, and maintenance of APIs within organizations, ensuring consistency, security, and efficiency in alignment with business objectives and regulatory requirements. It encompasses setting design standards, implementing robust security measures, ensuring compliance with industry regulations, and providing comprehensive documentation to support developers. Governance processes can be centralized to create consistent APIs across business lines while maintaining team autonomy, with models like Team Topologies offering frameworks for efficient API development. Effective API governance not only streamlines development efforts and fosters collaboration but also enhances security and compliance, ultimately driving innovation and business growth by enabling seamless integration and interoperability across systems.

The article provides a list of industry events for software developers and engineers around the world, covering various topics such as Ruby, Django, DevOps, cloud computing, and observability. The events include conferences like Monitorama, RubyConf India, RubyKaigi, DrupalCon Europe, DjangoCon EU, Strange Loop, Euroko, DjangoCon US, KubeCon | CloudNativeCon, QCon, and AWS re:Invent, among others. These events offer opportunities to learn from experts, network with peers, and discover new trends and practices in software development. Some of the notable speakers include Daniel Kim, Natalie Serrino, Leon Adato, Kelsey Hightower, and others. The article also highlights ongoing events like DevOps Days and New Relic's own program of events, user groups, and meetups.

Software developers and engineers seeking the best industry events can refer to a detailed list of conferences worldwide, updated for summer 2022, featuring significant gatherings like Monitorama in Portland, which addresses topics such as OpenTelemetry and the future of observability, and RubyConf India, focusing on Ruby language and tools. The list continues with events like RubyKaigi in Japan, DrupalCon Europe in Prague, and DjangoCon EU in Portugal, each offering opportunities for learning and networking within their respective communities. Additional notable events include Strange Loop in St. Louis, focusing on emerging technologies, and KubeCon in Detroit, dedicated to cloud-native computing. The guide also highlights the ongoing DevOps Days series and encourages engagement with New Relic's events for further learning and community interaction.

Postman is a tool that enables seamless collaboration and experimentation in a graphical interface for API development, with features such as error detection, auto-suggestions, and variable definitions. The new Postman Nerdgraph API collection provides support for building with APIs, including auto-complete suggestions for queries, allowing users to compose flexible requests to the New Relic GraphQL API. To get started, visit the API collection homepage, provide an API key, create a Postman Environment, define variables, and select the plus symbol to create a new environment. The collection is organized into two top-level folders: mutations and queries, with sub-folders for various topics in the New Relic account. Users can try out this tool on their own free account and connect with the New Relic Developer Relations team for questions or support.

Postman provides a user-friendly platform for interacting with New Relic's GraphQL API, NerdGraph, offering features like auto-complete support and schema updates to streamline query building and data exploration. NerdGraph allows users to retrieve detailed telemetry data and customize queries using New Relic's query language, NRQL, for more tailored insights. The newly released New Relic API collection on Postman enhances user experience by enabling error detection, auto-suggestions, and variable management across requests. The API collection is divided into mutations and queries folders, allowing users to modify account settings or request data efficiently. To begin utilizing this tool, users need to configure their Postman environment with API keys, and further assistance is available through New Relic's community channels and documentation for effective implementation.

New Relic has been recognized as a Leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability by Gartner, marking its tenth consecutive year at the top. The company's approach to APM and observability centers around providing customers with a unified data platform for all events and powerful full-stack analysis tools as part of the DevOps workflow. With nearly 15,000 customers, including 50% of the Fortune 100, New Relic offers an all-in-one platform that supports open standards, usage-based pricing, and platform innovation. The company's commitment to customer focus has been highlighted by its recognition as a 2021 Customers' Choice in Gartner Peer Insights for APM, with its differentiated pricing model fueling new customer acquisition and platform consumption. New Relic continues to accelerate its pace of innovation, releasing over 20 major launches in 2021 and announcing hundreds more in 2022.

Gartner's 2022 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability has recognized New Relic as a Leader for the tenth consecutive time, highlighting its innovative approach and customer-centric strategies. New Relic provides a unified data platform for metrics, logs, and traces, enabling engineers to adopt a data-driven approach throughout the software lifecycle, which enhances resolution times, planning cycles, and release frequency. With a usage-based pricing model, New Relic fosters a fair and flexible relationship with nearly 15,000 customers, including half of the Fortune 100, and supports open standards for greater deployment flexibility. The company continues to innovate, with significant developments such as Security RX and strategic partnerships, emphasizing its leadership in the transition from APM to observability.

Application logs are structured records of events and activities generated by software applications, capturing a wide range of information including error messages, user interactions, system events, and application-specific data. These logs serve as a crucial tool for troubleshooting and diagnosing issues, auditing and compliance, and performance monitoring. However, they require proper management throughout their lifecycle, which includes creation, collection, aggregation, storage, analysis, querying, visualization, and alerts, as well as archival and deletion. Effective log management enables developers and system administrators to identify the root cause of problems, track user activities, and optimize software systems, ultimately supporting debugging, security, compliance, and performance optimization.

Instrumenting applications, systems, and even coffee pots can be a familiar process for some, but for others, especially old-school IT practitioners, it may feel daunting. New Relic offers a cloud-native interface that automatically instruments networks, which can be intimidating at first. However, with its key features such as dashboards and alerts, monitoring network devices with New Relic can be a win for both the individual and the organization. To set up New Relic's network monitoring agent, one needs to gather prerequisites such as an SNMP string, CIDR-notated network segment, and a Linux-based system running Docker. The process involves installing Docker, setting up a new Relic account, adding more data, and running complex commands on the virtual machine hosting the agent. Once set up, the agent will continuously collect data from devices and transmit it to New Relic's database, providing real-time insights and alerts for improved network monitoring.

The blog post by Leon Adato provides a detailed guide on setting up network monitoring using New Relic, aimed at IT practitioners familiar with on-premises tools who may find cloud-native interfaces less intuitive. Drawing from his extensive IT experience, Adato explains the benefits of using New Relic for network monitoring, highlighting features like dashboards and alerts that offer aggregated views of system metrics. He guides readers through the process of installing the New Relic agent on a Linux or macOS system running Docker, emphasizing the importance of gathering necessary tools and information beforehand to avoid complications. The post also explains the steps to configure New Relic's network performance monitoring, including setting up the SNMP version and CIDR range, and running commands for initial network device discovery. Adato notes that while the setup is straightforward, ongoing maintenance may be required as network configurations change, and he encourages readers to explore further tutorials for more comprehensive monitoring solutions.

New Relic has introduced sliding window aggregation, a new method for managing alerts that aggregates metrics, smooths out visualizations, and alerts on erratic or infrequent signals. Users can create alert conditions using NRQL queries with advanced signal settings to handle continuous data signals. The platform's faceted baseline conditions allow users to control how data is aggregated in overlapping time windows, creating smoother charts through an intuitive slide mechanism. To get started, users select their desired interval and set up a new condition or edit an existing one, defining signal thresholds and fine-tuning advanced signal settings. New Relic has raised the maximum window duration to 120 minutes, allowing for more flexibility in managing alerts, and users should build an aggregation buffer before evaluating alerts to avoid triggering false positives. By implementing sliding window aggregation, users can effectively manage their alerts and gain insights from their data.

New Relic has introduced sliding window aggregation, a new method designed to enhance the management of alerts by smoothing out visualizations and detecting infrequent or erratic signals, such as latency and errors. Users can set alert conditions utilizing NRQL queries and advanced signal settings, which offer more precise control over data signals that may be intermittently missing. The sliding window aggregation allows data to be grouped into overlapping time windows, facilitating trend detection by smoothing the chart lines and reducing noise. Users can specify time periods from 1 to 120 minutes, and adjust aggregation settings through an intuitive mechanism, allowing for alerts to focus on significant trends. To implement this feature, users can adjust advanced signal settings and set slide-by intervals in the New Relic platform, although it is important to build an aggregation buffer to ensure the alerts function correctly. The blog post encourages users to explore this feature, offering a video demonstration and additional resources for those interested in leveraging sliding window aggregation for more effective alert management.

In the 21st century, humans have faced numerous challenges, including global health crises, economic recessions, and climate change. New Relic's Observability For Good program provides nonprofits with free tier access to optimize their web presence on over 2.5 million websites, similar to businesses using the platform. The Sneha Karma Foundation, a nonprofit organization empowering women in an underdeveloped community in northeast India, uses New Relic to monitor its online storefront and ensure a fully functional experience for customers and donors. By tracking Core Web Vitals and monitoring performance, nonprofits can reduce downtime, latency, and improve developer productivity, ultimately enhancing their social impact. New Relic has launched a $100,000 Impact Fund to support digital transformation projects in eligible nonprofits, providing unrestricted dollars for technology initiatives that improve organizational efficiency and social good efforts.

New Relic's Observability For Good (O4G) program, launched in 2020, provides nonprofits with access to their platform to optimize web presence, similar to businesses, by offering free tier access to their monitoring tools. The Sneha Karma Foundation (SKF), a nonprofit enriching the lives of women and girls in northeast India by selling silk products online, uses New Relic to ensure their e-commerce site functions optimally, highlighting the importance of a seamless online experience for maintaining customer and donor engagement. New Relic emphasizes reducing downtime, decreasing latency, and improving developer productivity as crucial for web developers, and has also introduced a $100,000 Impact Fund to support nonprofits in digital transformation and technology initiatives, offering grants up to $25,000 for projects that enhance organizational efficiency and promote social good. The company invites nonprofits to apply for the Impact Fund by June 10, 2022, and encourages organizations to utilize their browser monitoring tools to improve digital experiences.

New Relic has introduced log obfuscation options to help organizations protect sensitive data in their logs and ensure compliance with security guidelines. The new feature allows users to automatically mask patterns for credit cards and Social Security numbers, as well as create custom rules using regular expressions to hash or mask confidential data before it is stored. This enables better logs, easy security, and compliance while following organization's security guidelines without lengthy manual configurations or customizations. Log obfuscation can provide significant benefits such as data protection, compliance, customer trust, data governance, and data analysis by reducing the risk of data breaches, enhancing data privacy and security, and enabling organizations to use sensitive data in log files for analysis and troubleshooting without compromising data privacy and security.

New Relic's Data Plus option offers a scalable observability platform with advanced data capabilities such as extended retention, logs obfuscation, increased query limits, and FedRAMP/HIPAA compliance eligibility at a promotional price of $0.55/GB of data ingest. This new offering provides industry-leading security, performance, scale, and governance capabilities to support maturing observability practices, with simplified per-GB pricing and no complex billing structures. Data Plus includes features such as 90 days extended retention, up to 3x the maximum query limit and 2x the maximum duration per query, FedRAMP Moderate and HIPAA eligibility, advanced logs obfuscation rules, historical data export, streaming data export, multi-cloud provider choice, and New Relic Vulnerability Management. This move aims to help teams of all sizes scale their observability practices with advanced data capabilities while providing a flexible and affordable solution for data-first engineering organizations.