February 2023 Summaries

With distributed tracing, you can quickly understand complex problems and identify bottlenecks in modern applications by having a complete view of requests across your entire system. New Relic's distributed tracing feature provides this complete view without requiring additional configuration. You can now view distributed traces directly in logs and errors inbox, making it easier to find the traces you need. The feature also presents related distributed traces in various locations, allowing you to access them quickly. With streamlined access to related distributed traces, you can improve your monitoring and troubleshooting processes, spend more time resolving issues with data, and enhance app performance.

Distributed tracing, an integral feature of New Relic's application performance monitoring (APM), enhances the ability to monitor and troubleshoot modern applications by providing a comprehensive view of requests across entire systems, thus facilitating the quick identification of complex issues and bottlenecks. This feature allows users to view distributed traces directly in logs and error inboxes, making it easier to locate the necessary traces and resolve issues more efficiently. New Relic presents related distributed traces in various contexts such as error groups and log details, which helps users spend more time addressing data-driven issues rather than searching for non-existent traces. By incorporating distributed tracing into logs and errors, users can streamline their monitoring processes and improve application performance, with easy access to documentation and installation guides to maximize the benefits of this feature.

New Relic service level management (SLM) is a tool that helps DevOps teams and SREs identify business-critical services and monitor their health with service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs). This allows for proactive establishment of processes to speed up code writing, pushing to production, and identifying bugs or outages quickly. New Relic's error budget feature helps reduce alert fatigue by configuring SLOs to only alert when the burn rate is above one for a sustained period of time. Defining service level objectives (SLOs) defines the target level of reliability or performance for a service. Monitoring and measuring service metrics, using error budgets to drive prioritization, automating error budget calculations, regularly reviewing and adjusting SLOs and error budgets are best practices for implementing effective error budgeting as part of an SRE practice. By setting up alerts on SLI- and SLO-related performance degradations with New Relic, teams can detect incidents quickly and resolve them before they affect customers. Conducting thorough incident post-mortems helps in understanding the root causes of service level breaches and formulating more effective response strategies. Implementing service levels properly leads to better customer and business outcomes, improves the quality of life for SRE and DevOps teams by driving focus and reducing alert fatigue.

New Relic's service level management (SLM) provides a structured approach to monitor and enhance the reliability of business-critical services using service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs). By incorporating error budgets and burn rate alerts, organizations can proactively manage service degradations and failures, often identifying issues before they impact customers. The use of error budgets helps balance the focus between system reliability and innovation by setting acceptable error thresholds that inform prioritization decisions. This system reduces alert fatigue by eliminating unnecessary notifications and emphasizes actionable alerts for critical issues. Additionally, New Relic enables teams to set up and optimize alerts for SLIs and SLOs, ensuring that performance metrics are met and providing a framework for continuous improvement through post-incident reviews. This approach not only enhances the service reliability but also supports a culture of accountability and shared responsibility among development and operations teams.

Platform engineering is about building platforms that support teams in developing and deploying software quickly and reliably. It involves providing standardized tools and workflows to make the day-to-day of building applications easier. Platform engineers focus on building "paved roads" for their teams, which are clear, standardized paths for building and deploying software, reducing cognitive load without taking away autonomy. Observability is a crucial part of platform engineering, as it provides timely feedback on performance, errors, and user engagement to improve release quality, increase release frequency, and operational efficiency. Platform engineers need to build observability solutions that minimize cognitive load and tool sprawl, are fast and easy to implement, easily customizable, scalable, and offer features such as alert notifications, log management, application performance monitoring, distributed traces, Kubernetes monitoring, real user and synthetic monitoring, infrastructure and network monitoring. To implement observability in their platform, platform engineers should aim for 100% observability, consider data security before gathering monitoring data, set up monitoring for essential metrics, deploy applications with APM, include other services that applications rely on, automate everything, including default alerts and dashboards, and use observability as code.

This year, New Relic celebrated Black History Month with the theme of Black U.N.I.T.Y., which stands for Celebrating Uniqueness, Building Networks, Valuing Inclusion, Honoring Tradition, and Being the Best YOU. The company's diversity, equity, and inclusion team is working to support various efforts to promote equality, justice, and unity among its employees. New Relic recognizes the importance of acknowledging and celebrating the unique experiences and contributions of Black people in the workplace. The company has implemented programs such as the Relics of Color employee resource group, which provides a space for Black employees to share their individual experiences and preferences, and daily prompts on Slack channels that encourage open discussions. Additionally, New Relic sponsors events like AfroTech to build relationships between employees and Black professionals from across the tech industry. The company values inclusion, believes in refining its practices of allyship, and is committed to creating a more inclusive workplace. By honoring traditions and recognizing the importance of authenticity, New Relic aims to create a culture that allows all employees to feel included and valued.

Platform engineering focuses on creating standardized tools and workflows to streamline software development and deployment, emphasizing self-service pipelines, infrastructure provisioning, and observability tools like New Relic. Platform engineers facilitate the process by building "paved roads," providing preconfigured solutions such as Kubernetes cluster management and database provisioning to support DevOps teams, allowing them to develop and deploy software efficiently and consistently. Observability is crucial within platform engineering, as it enables timely feedback on software performance and errors, helping teams to understand the impact of changes and troubleshoot issues effectively. Platform engineers aim to reduce cognitive load by offering customizable, scalable, and unified observability solutions that integrate various monitoring tools, such as distributed tracing, application performance monitoring, and real user monitoring, to ensure comprehensive visibility across environments. They also focus on automating the configuration of alerts and dashboards to maintain operational efficiency and adapt to teams' specific needs, while ensuring security and compliance with organizational policies.

February's Black History Month is celebrated by New Relic with the theme of Black U.N.I.T.Y., focusing on celebrating uniqueness, building networks, valuing inclusion, honoring tradition, and being the best self. The company's diversity, equity, and inclusion team supports efforts led by employee resource groups like Relics of Color, Black Relics, and Black Girl Magic to create spaces where Black employees can express their unique identities and experiences. The initiative includes educational discussions, mentorship opportunities, and community-building activities, such as sponsoring attendance at AfroTech to foster relationships and career growth. New Relic emphasizes the importance of inclusion and belonging as essential to innovation and success, and it seeks to create opportunities for Black professionals to share their authentic selves. The company also honors its traditions by remembering influential figures like Mikey Butler, a former vice president of engineering, who advocated for diversity in the tech industry and paved the way for underrepresented groups.

New Relic is an extensive platform designed to enhance the performance, efficiency, and security of your entire tech stack through comprehensive monitoring tools and interfaces. It offers detailed insights into application performance monitoring (APM), enabling users to monitor backend services, frontend issues, and external services through various UI elements such as the APM & services summary, web transactions, and logs. New Relic provides users with the ability to sort and analyze data by various criteria, offering a complete view of application performance and its dependencies. The platform is accessible via mobile apps, allowing users to receive real-time alerts and access essential features like dashboards, NRQL, and synthetic monitoring on the go. The platform encourages users to explore its documentation and tutorials to resolve performance issues and offers a free account option with certain data and user limitations. Jemiah Sius, the Director of Developer Relations at New Relic, emphasizes engaging the developer community and provides a disclaimer that the views expressed in the blog may not necessarily reflect those of New Relic.

Thortful`, an e-marketplace company, relies heavily on technology to deliver a seamless customer experience during busy periods, particularly around Valentine's Day and other seasonal events. To achieve this, they use various tools and techniques such as monitoring key metrics for customer experience, automating alerts with data, improving database response times, and using New Relic for platform performance and technical testing. By leveraging these strategies, Thortful is able to scale their growth while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.

Thortful, an e-marketplace in the B2C space, experiences significant spikes in traffic during seasonal events like Valentine's Day, requiring a strong focus on customer experience and platform performance. The company relies heavily on tools like New Relic for observability, enabling them to monitor key metrics such as conversion rates, response times, and checkouts per second, especially during peak periods. By being cloud-based with AWS, Thortful can efficiently scale resources to match demand, ensuring swift issue resolution and maintaining high site performance. Automation is leveraged to streamline operations, with alerts and notifications set up to promptly address any deviations from baseline metrics. This approach has allowed Thortful to achieve consistent growth, optimize database response times, and enhance user experience through detailed monitoring and analysis of their systems, helping them limit downtime and improve service reliability.

Observability Day, or "O11y Day," is a series of informal meet-ups initiated by Jemiah Sius at New Relic to connect with observability practitioners and users of New Relic's products across the United States. After a hiatus due to the pandemic, these events have resumed in 2023, starting in Dallas and continuing in Miami. The Miami event, scheduled on February 23, 2023, at TopGolf Miami Doral, will include workshops on leveraging Observability-as-code with Pulumi and collecting custom metrics with New Relic Flex. These gatherings aim to facilitate learning and discussions about observability practices, product roadmaps, and user needs, offering attendees workshops, demos, and opportunities for candid conversations. The events are part of an ongoing series that New Relic plans to expand to more cities and eventually worldwide.

Log monitoring for cloud-native architectures presents unique challenges due to the complexity of modern web applications, which often involve multiple microservices, containers, and open source components. Unlike traditional applications, cloud-native environments generate vast and varied amounts of log data that require sophisticated strategies for aggregation, analysis, and storage to ensure effective application health monitoring. Key challenges include handling the scale and variety of logs, addressing ephemeral storage issues, and avoiding vendor lock-in, which can hinder performance monitoring across different cloud services. Best practices for overcoming these challenges include implementing centralized log management solutions, adopting open standards like OpenTelemetry to prevent vendor dependency, and utilizing advanced technologies such as eBPF and no-code interfaces for improved data collection and visualization. Additionally, ensuring logs contain useful metadata and exclude sensitive information is crucial for effective performance analysis and decision-making. New Relic's platform offers tools like AIOps and distributed tracing to enhance real-time application performance monitoring in cloud-native environments, although the strategies discussed are environment-specific and not part of New Relic's commercial offerings.

New Relic Vulnerability Management is a platform that allows teams to address vulnerabilities in their software stack by integrating signals from third-party security tools and providing a unified view of telemetry data and vulnerability insights. The platform offers prebuilt integrations with leading security tools such as AWS Security Hub, GitHub Dependabot, Snyk, and Aquasec Trivy, making it easy to manage security risks across the tech stack. It also provides a flexible security API for custom integration and supports over 500 prebuilt integrations for seamless data instrumentation from nearly any telemetry source.

New Relic Security RX is an observability platform designed to enhance communication and collaboration across teams by providing a centralized view of vulnerabilities alongside telemetry data. It facilitates the integration of various third-party security tools, offering over 500 prebuilt integrations with step-by-step instructions to unify security data management. The platform supports integrations with AWS Security Hub, GitHub Dependabot, Snyk, and Aquasec Trivy, allowing users to monitor vulnerabilities, automate remediation, and correlate security findings with application performance data for improved detection and resolution times. New Relic's Security Events API offers flexibility for custom vulnerability data integration, making it adaptable to different workflows. It is accessible to free account holders and Data Plus customers, while standard accounts can enable it as an add-on.

PHP is a widely-used programming language for server-side applications, supporting projects like WordPress and Laravel, and accounting for over 77% of web applications. However, its widespread use also makes it a target for various security vulnerabilities, including cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), session hijacking, buffer overflows, and denial of service (DoS) attacks. To mitigate these threats, developers should implement input validation, parameterized queries, session management, and secure communication protocols such as HTTPS. Tools like New Relic Security RX provide a comprehensive view of security vulnerabilities across PHP applications, offering insights into third-party dependencies and enabling proactive monitoring and alerts for potential threats. Security strategies should also include regular audits, secure hosting, fault-tolerant designs, and adherence to best practices such as the principle of least privilege to minimize the impact of potential breaches. By leveraging observability tools and adhering to secure coding practices, developers can better protect PHP applications from attacks and ensure robust application performance.

New Relic's browser monitoring tool provides a comprehensive solution for developers to enhance web application performance and user experience by integrating Google Web Vitals into its interface, allowing immediate access to critical metrics such as load performance and responsiveness without needing custom dashboards. The platform introduces features that help users quickly diagnose and resolve performance issues, like visualizing application metrics across different devices and regions, which aids in reducing mean time to resolution. Users can filter traffic data by device type, operating system, and geography to pinpoint and address specific performance problems, thereby facilitating more efficient debugging and optimization in dynamic environments. New Relic emphasizes continuous innovation in real user monitoring, promising more features in the future, and offers a free account to help users get started with these capabilities.

I joined the New Relic Ignite Program in July 2022, a two-to-six-month incubator team designed to provide early career engineers with additional support and coaching. As an Associate Software Engineer, I rotated through different teams, gaining knowledge in various areas and eventually transitioning to my new team after completing the program. The program taught me the importance of adapting to new technologies and staying up-to-date with relevant programming languages, frameworks, and tools. Through pair programming and guidance from experienced engineers, I learned how to work effectively with fellow engineers to solve problems. I can confidently say that the Ignite Program is an incredible opportunity for early career engineers, providing invaluable knowledge and experience, and I highly recommend applying if interested.

In July 2022, Josiah Cornelius joined the New Relic Ignite Program, an incubator designed to support early career engineers through team rotations, mentorship, and skill development in various technologies. Participants start as Associate Software Engineers, rotating among different teams for two to six months before being placed on a team as Software Engineer I. Josiah's five-month experience included exposure to client-side technologies like React, infrastructure challenges, and the Kafka messaging system, which provided a comprehensive understanding of New Relic's tools and systems. The program emphasized adapting to new technologies and teamwork, with pair programming playing a significant role in problem-solving and learning from experienced engineers. Josiah highly recommends the Ignite Program as an excellent opportunity for early career engineers seeking growth and development.

New Relic, in collaboration with AWS Activate, has launched New Relic for Startups to support early-stage startups in building and scaling software efficiently. This initiative allows AWS Activate members to access New Relic's comprehensive cloud-based observability platform, which aids in monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing AWS services. The platform offers more than 50 capabilities, including real-time analysis of errors, transactions, metrics, and logs, and is designed to help startups manage their systems without needing complex or expensive tooling. New Relic's integration with over 780 tools facilitates seamless monitoring, while partnerships with companies like Zendesk and Carta provide startups with additional resources and credits. Startups can utilize New Relic's platform without engaging in sales discussions, making it easier to integrate and use from the command line. The platform is strategically positioned to help startups focus on innovation and customer experience by enhancing visibility and operational efficiency across their development processes.

As a platform quality engineer at Nexthink, my team and I own releases for the core product suite, which placed us at the heart of the company's migration to the cloud in 2020. We partnered with New Relic to transform our delivery model and overall offering with real-time observability, approximately 80% of our business now being in the cloud. Nexthink Infinity is a human-centric data platform designed to increase employee productivity and satisfaction by quantifying user experience via diagnostics. The company migrated to the cloud to improve scalability and reduce server configuration needs, adopting a lift-and-shift approach instead of rebuilding from scratch. New Relic helps us access data quickly through dashboards and NRQL, enabling real-time analysis and pinpointing problems. This has improved internal communication, enabled proactive issue response, and paved the way for DevOps by reducing risk and increasing continuous delivery. The company's culture also shifted to a more agile approach, with instant releases and constant application updates, allowing developers to focus on meaningful tasks and deliver value faster.

Pascal Gandilhon, a platform quality engineer at Nexthink, discusses the company's strategic migration to the cloud, which significantly transformed both their delivery model and cultural dynamics. By partnering with New Relic, Nexthink enhanced real-time observability, enabling them to deploy most of their business on the cloud and improve their service offerings, including the Nexthink Infinity data platform that quantifies user experience. The shift from an on-premises model to a cloud-based approach involved a lift-and-shift strategy, allowing Nexthink to streamline operations, enhance internal communication, and respond to issues proactively. This transition also facilitated a cultural shift towards a DevOps model with continuous integration and delivery, reducing risk and empowering engineers to focus on meaningful tasks. The integration of New Relic's dashboards and monitoring tools provided a unified view of data, improving their ability to manage and resolve issues efficiently.