December 2022 Summaries

The article reflects on Amazon's The Rings of Power series, drawing parallels between its themes and lessons to software development and developer marketing. It emphasizes the importance of embracing failures and mistakes as opportunities for growth, rather than hiding them. This approach fosters a culture of openness and acceptance, allowing others to learn from the same experiences without having to make the same mistakes. The article also highlights the value of curiosity in exploration and discovery, but cautions that it's not just about exploring, but also about handling the consequences and fallout of one's discoveries. Finally, it notes that a tech career is an ongoing story with ever-changing themes and challenges, requiring flexibility and adaptability to navigate uncertainty and chaos.

In a reflective piece inspired by Amazon's "The Rings of Power," Leon Adato explores the themes of curiosity, failure, and personal growth within the context of both the fantasy series and his extensive IT career. He emphasizes the value of learning from mistakes, suggesting that openly sharing failures can benefit both the individual and their community. Adato draws parallels between the story's characters and IT professionals, highlighting how curiosity can lead to both discovery and challenges, and how handling the consequences with honesty and maturity is crucial. He concludes by noting the ever-evolving nature of a tech career and the importance of embracing change and uncertainty as part of personal and professional development, drawing insights from his own journey through various roles in the IT industry.

The Rings of Power' series offers valuable lessons for tech careers and work, emphasizing the importance of understanding one's core essence, finding comfort in a role, and building relationships with others. The show highlights how individuals can adapt to new environments, learn from others, and form meaningful connections despite initial differences. By embracing challenges and being open to new experiences, professionals can not only grow personally but also foster strong bonds with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.

Leon Adato's blog post draws insightful parallels between the core values of various groups in Amazon's "The Rings of Power" series and the personal journey of understanding one's role and purpose in a tech career. He highlights how elves, dwarves, orcs, and hobbits each have distinct motivations, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness and honesty in one's professional life. Adato suggests that while finding comfort in one's work is essential, stepping outside this comfort zone can lead to personal growth and the formation of meaningful relationships, as illustrated by the series' characters who overcome differences to forge alliances. He underscores the transformative power of friendship and collaboration, even across seemingly insurmountable divides, using examples from the series to illustrate how understanding and choosing one's path can lead to a more fulfilling and impactful career.

At Sportradar, a leading sports technology company, they employ platform engineering to support their developers and enhance their development experience. This approach includes restructuring teams for self-sufficiency, using paved roads for common developer tasks, creating a core set of common metrics, and publishing a managed services catalog. By doing so, the company aims to deliver positive outcomes for customers while reducing complexity and increasing time-to-market. The platform engineering enables a cohesive approach, aligning DevOps and platform engineers around common principles and goals, and ensuring that developers can focus on building great applications without worrying about the ecosystem.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a widely used cloud computing service that provides scalable virtual servers, known as compute instances, for application development and deployment in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. While Amazon CloudWatch offers basic monitoring capabilities for EC2 instances, such as CPU, disk usage, and networking metrics, it does not provide comprehensive insights into application performance metrics like latency and error rates. To achieve full observability, users are encouraged to integrate platforms like New Relic, which offer advanced monitoring tools such as application performance monitoring (APM) and real user monitoring. These tools not only provide detailed insights into the performance and health of applications running on EC2 instances but also facilitate rightsizing, which helps in optimizing resource usage and cloud spend. A well-structured monitoring plan includes setting service level objectives, designating monitoring responsibilities, and establishing alert mechanisms to ensure efficient management of EC2 resources. New Relic's integration with AWS allows it to automatically instrument EC2 instances, providing a unified view of application and infrastructure metrics, thereby enhancing troubleshooting and optimization capabilities.

Sportradar, a leading sports technology company, enhances its developer experience by conducting workshops to gather insights and challenges from its engineering community, leading to the adoption of a cohesive platform engineering approach that emphasizes self-sufficiency and cross-functionality among developer teams. By implementing a model inspired by Spotify, Sportradar reorganized its teams in 2019, allowing DevOps specialists to be embedded within squads while maintaining a central platform function. The company employs a "paved roads" strategy to streamline common developer tasks and reduce friction, utilizing standardized metrics like availability, reliability, and performance through tools such as New Relic to simplify observability. Additionally, Sportradar has developed an internal developer portal featuring a managed services catalog and scorecards to facilitate project bootstrapping and service selection, enabling developers to focus on application complexities rather than the surrounding ecosystem. This structured approach, supported by an engineering enablement group, aligns platform and DevOps engineers with common goals and ensures the effective implementation of best practices across the organization.

The author of the text draws parallels between Amazon's The Rings of Power series and the journey through technology to convey several lessons for developers and IT professionals. One key takeaway is the importance of perseverance in pursuing a project or solution until it feels complete, even if others may have lost interest. This requires making a compelling case to justify continued effort, rather than simply relying on personal conviction. The author also highlights the value of apologizing when mistakes are made, as this can be a powerful way to learn and grow. Additionally, they note that true leadership involves recognizing the limitations of one's own abilities and being willing to ask for help or guidance from others. Finally, the text encourages readers to revisit the series and explore its themes in more depth.

Leon Adato draws parallels between Amazon's "The Rings of Power" series and the world of technology, emphasizing lessons of perseverance, leadership, and the power of apology in professional settings. He highlights how characters like Galadriel embody the relentless pursuit of goals, even when faced with skepticism, stressing the importance of making a compelling case to gain support. Adato also critiques the pitfalls of "grind culture" in leadership, advocating for a balanced approach that values team well-being over relentless work ethic. Furthermore, he underscores the significance of acknowledging mistakes and offering sincere apologies, exemplified by characters like Elrond and Durin, as a vital component of personal and professional growth. Adato invites readers to revisit the series for its deeper insights and to engage with broader discussions in the IT community through platforms like the Explorers Hub.

AWS Lambda enables the execution of applications without server management, but it requires effective monitoring tools like New Relic to address potential issues that AWS does not cover, such as code quality and configuration problems. While AWS provides insights into billing and compute times, it lacks visibility into code performance, necessitating tools like New Relic for full observability and proactive error detection. New Relic's serverless monitoring wraps around Lambda functions to provide detailed metrics and error information, while synthetic monitoring simulates user flows in production to identify performance issues. This combination allows users to monitor internal function execution and external application performance, ensuring swift identification and resolution of problems before they affect end users.

AfroTech is a conference that brings together Black tech professionals to highlight their talent, innovation, and resources for success in the industry. New Relic has been sponsoring AfroTech since 2018 to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion by engaging and recruiting underrepresented groups in tech. The company's goal was to create a cross-functional business strategy that includes employee engagement, leadership investment, and building new tech talent communities to source beyond the event. The conference featured several events, including a welcome reception, talks on topics such as web3, and career development sessions, where attendees could learn about New Relic's culture and product innovation. The company also hosted employee engagements, such as a Black Girl Magic Lunch, where Black women employees could have intimate conversations around career journeys and mentorship. Overall, AfroTech aims to create a community that fosters deeper connections, career growth, and opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech.

AfroTech, launched in 2016, is a conference aimed at uniting Black tech professionals to spotlight their talents and foster success in the industry. Since 2018, New Relic has sponsored AfroTech to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion within the tech sector by engaging Relics of Color and participating in various events, such as recruiting efforts and networking opportunities. The 2022 AfroTech conference, New Relic's fifth year of involvement, featured a cross-functional business strategy focusing on employee engagement, leadership investment, and building tech talent communities. Key events included a welcome reception, career development sessions, and a Black Girl Magic Lunch, all designed to inspire and connect attendees while promoting New Relic's culture and career opportunities. AfroTech provided a platform for personal and professional growth, enabling participants to expand their networks and gain valuable insights from talks on technology, authenticity, and emerging trends.

This summary provides an overview of a blog post discussing how to set up a custom metric using Flex, a tool for ingesting and visualizing data in New Relic, with Ookla's Speedtest utility as the data source. The post explains that Flex can automatically ingest JSON data from external tools like Speedtest, making it easy to collect and visualize metrics such as download speed and latency. The author provides a YAML configuration file to set up the integration, including a timeout of 5 minutes and an interval of 1 hour between tests. The post also discusses how to remove unnecessary keys in the JSON data and post-process the data to get the desired metric values. Finally, it provides instructions on how to ingest the custom data into New Relic and visualize it on a dashboard. The author invites readers to join a discussion on Reddit and provides links to further resources and documentation.

The blog post explores the process of using Ookla's Speedtest command line utility to measure internet speed metrics, such as latency, download, and upload bandwidth, and demonstrates how to integrate this data into New Relic using the Flex integration in JSON format. The author, Leon Adato, explains that JSON is preferred by many IT practitioners due to its widespread use in APIs and utilities, and he provides a detailed guide for setting up this integration, including configuring a YAML file to run Speedtest commands and removing unnecessary keys like timestamps to prevent data conflicts. The post emphasizes the benefits of using JSON over CSV for output formatting and concludes with instructions on querying the collected data using NRQL, converting bandwidth measurements to bits per second, and visualizing the results on a dashboard. Adato invites readers to engage with the New Relic community for further discussions and provides links to additional resources for exploring more Flex configurations and previous parts of the blog series.

"The New Relic Flex integration is a powerful tool for IT practitioners to collect and display critical metrics from various sources, including custom scripts. The integration allows users to create YAML files that define the command to run, the output format, and other settings. To troubleshoot issues, users can run the New Relic Flex utility manually or set up logging options to get more detailed error messages. Once the data is collected, users can use NRQL queries to display the data in a meaningful way, including creating custom charts and dashboards. The script behind the scenes uses Python to interact with external commands, such as speedtest, and extracts relevant data from the output. With this integration, IT practitioners can get the data they need to monitor their systems and applications more effectively."

The article delves into the use of New Relic Flex for integrating custom data metrics, particularly focusing on scenarios where pre-made New Relic agents and quickstarts fall short. It provides a detailed tutorial on using scripting to reformat and combine data outputs from multiple commands, with a specific example involving internet speed testing using Ookla's Speedtest.net utility. The tutorial includes steps on installing the utility, processing its output to display download and upload speeds in Mbps using a Python script, and configuring New Relic Flex to visualize these metrics on a dashboard. The article also discusses troubleshooting techniques, such as running Flex manually and setting up logging to ensure the integration functions correctly, and provides NRQL queries for displaying data in New Relic. The content is authored by Leon Adato, a Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, and emphasizes the importance of adapting solutions to specific environments while encouraging engagement in the Explorers Hub for further discussion and support.

The author reflects on Amazon's The Rings of Power series and draws parallels between its themes and lessons for life and work in tech. They highlight the importance of taking time to understand the ever-widening cast of characters, fitting into the larger story, and not getting too far-sighted, as this can lead to a loss of grounding and credibility. The author also emphasizes the value of believing and supporting women in IT, citing strong female characters in the series who embody these qualities. Ultimately, the author encourages readers to let their IT career take its time, build slowly, and remain grounded in the present moment.

This summary highlights how monitoring GitLab jobs and pipelines using OpenTelemetry and the New Relic GitLab quickstart can provide visibility into the building and deployment phases of the DevOps lifecycle, helping developers shift left by getting observability for their build and deploy processes. The integration allows tracking key metrics on pipeline executions, visualizing jobs and pipeline executions as distributed traces with logs in context, pinpointing issues, creating alerts, and more. The setup involves two main parts: the New Relic exporter, which exports pipeline data as logs and traces, and the New Relic metrics exporter, which gathers data from the GitLab API about projects, pipelines, jobs, runners, environments, deployments, and releases, then exports it to New Relic as a mixture of metrics and logs. By following the provided steps, users can set up the integration, configure exporters, test and confirm that New Relic is receiving data, create a pipeline schedule, import the quickstart dashboard, and gain complete visibility into their GitLab estate. This setup enables developers to monitor their build and deploy processes more effectively, helping them improve their DevOps practices.

Leon Adato, a developer relations advocate at New Relic, finds parallels between the tech industry and Amazon's "The Rings of Power" series, particularly highlighting lessons on pacing, mentorship, and foresight. He draws comparisons between the slow narrative buildup of the series and the gradual journey of an IT career, emphasizing the importance of understanding one's role within a larger story. Adato also warns against the pitfalls of being overly farsighted, using a quote from the series to illustrate the danger of losing touch with the present. Additionally, he underscores the importance of believing in and learning from women, as depicted by the series' strong female characters. Adato concludes with an invitation to further discussions on tech and culture, cautioning that his insights are personal and not representative of New Relic's official stance.

The blog post discusses how to enhance the observability of GitLab CI/CD pipelines using OpenTelemetry and New Relic's GitLab quickstart. It guides users through setting up monitoring for GitLab jobs and pipelines to track key metrics, visualize executions as distributed traces, and create alerts for potential issues. The integration is split into two parts: the New Relic exporter and the New Relic metrics exporter, each configured to export pipeline data to New Relic, allowing users to inspect pipeline runs and explore logs. The post details the setup process, including the creation of CI/CD variables, pipeline configurations, and testing procedures, while emphasizing the importance of scheduling and regular data exports to ensure comprehensive monitoring. It also introduces a pre-built dashboard to help users visualize data and suggests further customizations and alert configurations to maximize insights into the DevOps lifecycle.

When you're just getting started with New Relic, you get a solid foundation for observability right out of the gate. However, no solution has absolutely everything, and finding the perfect monitoring solution can be challenging. Many folks in IT need to add custom metrics, events, logs, or traces to their existing monitoring solutions. To accommodate these needs, New Relic offers Flex, an application-agnostic integration that allows users to instrument any metric they can find. Flex requires installing the infrastructure agent on a system and configuring YAML files in the integrations.d directory. The YAML file must have specific guidelines, such as having a certain format, indents, and permissions. Users can create custom Flex integrations by creating YAML files with their desired metrics and settings. Once configured, these integrations will send data to New Relic. While Flex provides a flexible way to collect custom data, users need to understand how to query and visualize this data using New Relic Query Language (NRQL) or other tools. With Flex, users can create custom dashboards and charts with their collected data, providing more detailed insights into their systems' performance.

New Relic provides a comprehensive observability platform with pre-built agents and resources, but when critical metrics are missing, the Flex integration allows users to collect custom monitoring data effortlessly. Flex is described as an application-agnostic tool that works alongside the infrastructure agent, requiring users to configure YAML files to integrate custom data into New Relic. The blog post offers guidance on setting up Flex, emphasizing the significance of correct YAML configuration, and explains how to use New Relic Query Language (NRQL) to visualize and manage the collected data. The author underscores the ease of transforming data into charts for dashboards and hints at future posts expanding on Flex's capabilities. The blog emphasizes the platform's scalability and customization potential, while also providing user engagement through community forums and further resources.

Terraform is used to define and manage cloud and on-prem resources, but creating dynamic dashboards can be challenging. To overcome this, Terraform can be combined with the NRQL (New Relic Query Language) to dynamically create a dashboard based on live data. This approach allows for real-time data-driven dashboards without requiring changes to the Terraform configuration. The process involves defining a GraphQL query using NRQL, specifying an API key and account ID, and passing the query result into a template file to generate the dashboard. The resulting dashboard displays the top five public APIs by total calls and updates dynamically with new data. This approach can be used to create dynamic dashboards for various use cases, such as tracking popular products or poorly performing servers.

In this blog, James Buchanan, a Principal Solutions Architect at New Relic, explains how to use Terraform and NRQL (New Relic Query Language) to create dynamic dashboards in New Relic based on live data. This installment, part three of a series, details how to leverage a Terraform provider to query the New Relic GraphQL API and generate a dashboard that reflects the top five most popular APIs over the past 24 hours, without modifying the existing Terraform configuration. The process involves defining a GraphQL query, configuring the GraphQL provider with an API key, and utilizing the `jsondecode` function to extract necessary data from NRQL query results, which are then used in a template file to dynamically create dashboard rows. This approach allows for creating dashboards that adapt to changing data, such as top-performing apps or overloaded servers, and recommends maintaining these configurations through a CI/CD workflow for ongoing updates. The blog encourages readers to explore the accompanying code repository for practical examples and highlights the value of integrating Terraform with New Relic to enhance observability through customizable dashboards.

New Relic's Flex is a customizable solution that allows users to collect and send custom data from various applications and tools, including environmental solutions for temperature and HVAC, local backup tools, cable and network management systems, and more. It works by using the New Relic infrastructure agent and a config file to generate the desired data format. Flex can be used to monitor services running in Kubernetes, IoT devices, and other non-traditional hardware, as well as combine data from closed applications with server performance data. The solution requires basic knowledge of New Relic Query Language (NRQL) and YAML configuration files, but users can get started quickly with a sample and documentation. Flex is available for free with a New Relic account, which includes 100 GB/month of free data ingest, one free full-access user, and unlimited free basic users.

New Relic's Flex is a versatile, application-agnostic tool designed to integrate custom data into New Relic's observability platform, providing solutions for diverse IT environments without requiring multiple monitoring tools. Flex operates via New Relic's infrastructure agent and a configuration file, allowing users to collect data from various sources such as CLI commands, external URLs, or API calls, and display it on dashboards or use it for alerts. It supports a wide array of applications, from proprietary ticketing systems to Kubernetes clusters and IoT devices, offering flexibility to meet unique organizational needs. Users only need a basic understanding of New Relic Query Language (NRQL) and YAML to set up Flex, supported by documentation and educational resources. New Relic also offers a GitHub repository with over 200 open-source solutions for custom data integration, encouraging community collaboration and knowledge sharing.

To create a dynamic New Relic dashboard using Terraform and JSON templates, start by building a row of widgets with a template file, then define input configuration for the services to be displayed. Dynamically generate rows for each service using template syntax, including calculating the layout and metrics based on the index of the item in the list. Use string interpolation to make the dashboard values dynamic and reusable. Create a Terraform resource to render the output of the template file, apply the configuration, and debug any errors that occur during creation. The resulting dashboard will display rows of widgets for each API service, with dynamically generated metrics and layout based on the input configuration.

Terraform is utilized to create dynamic New Relic dashboards by using JSON templates and NRQL queries, allowing for the automation of data generation and dashboard updates. The guide outlines the process of building a complex dashboard from simple input data, showcasing how to display various API metrics from services like Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. By employing template expressions, users can generate dashboards efficiently without repetitive configuration, leveraging Terraform's ability to iterate over configuration objects to dynamically populate dashboard values. The tutorial emphasizes configuring inputs via Terraform files, using dynamic layout strategies to avoid repeated code, and employing string interpolation to customize NRQL queries and widget content dynamically. The blog further explains the creation of Terraform resources to render the dashboard and offers troubleshooting tips for any configuration errors encountered during the process.