March 2023 Summaries

This blog post aims to provide a solid foundation for getting started with the New Relic observability platform by highlighting five key areas of focus: guided installation, data visualization, querying data, navigating entity relationships and contextual data, and finding help and sharing feedback. The author encourages users to start with these core features to effectively utilize the platform's capabilities and explore its various tools and resources.

Navigating the New Relic observability platform can initially seem daunting due to its extensive features and capabilities, but this guide provides a structured approach for beginners to effectively harness its potential. The platform caters to all engineers, offering tools for various roles such as DevOps and security, and emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive observability solution for tech stack insights. Key starting points include utilizing the guided installation to integrate data, exploring diverse data visualization methods like the All Entities view, and mastering data queries through the New Relic Query Language (NRQL). Additionally, understanding entity relationships and contextual data through features like Automap and distributed tracing enhances system comprehension. For further support, New Relic offers extensive documentation, community forums, and educational resources, encouraging users to provide feedback to improve the customer experience.

At New Relic, equity is a year-round focus aimed at promoting equal outcomes in the workplace and career journeys for women, acknowledging that individuals have different pathways to success. The company's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team and Women at New Relic employee resource group shared resources and hosted global events celebrating women's achievements and advocating for equity in tech. This effort is part of a broader initiative to encourage ally skills training and self-education to ensure equity becomes a reality for all. By embracing equity, New Relic aims to create a more inclusive workplace culture and promote equal opportunities for career development and leadership. The company encourages everyone to participate in Ally Skills training and find ways to strengthen ally skills, and invites readers to join the Explorers Hub for questions and support related to this blog post.

March is a month dedicated to recognizing the contributions of women throughout history and promoting equity, which is a central focus for New Relic beyond just supporting equal efforts. The company emphasizes the importance of providing resources and actions to achieve equitable outcomes, acknowledging different needs for women to reach equality. This year, New Relic's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team, along with the Women at New Relic employee resource group, organized over 30 global events to celebrate women's achievements, including fireside chats and the Women Impact Tech Accelerate Conference in San Francisco. These initiatives aim to foster mentorship, connection, and belonging, with activities like Ally Skills training to help employees learn about privilege and advocacy. The company's efforts are part of a broader commitment to equity, featuring discussions on the challenges faced by Black women in the tech industry and ongoing educational opportunities to ensure that equity becomes a reality for all.

{^`-extracting name-value pairs from log lines is a common use case for regular expressions in log parsing. Developing a good regex requires iterative testing with new data and edge cases to improve reliability and performance. A lookahead rule can be used to capture single key-value pairs, making the regex more robust. To capture multiple fields, non-capturing groups and named groups can be used. Best practices for using regex include starting simple, using specific patterns, avoiding greedy matches, optimizing for performance, and commenting the regex pattern. Regular expressions are a powerful tool for log parsing, but they require careful consideration of edge cases and special characters to ensure accurate results.

Regular expressions (regex) are a powerful tool for developers to extract and manipulate text data efficiently, particularly in log parsing contexts. While crafting an effective regex, developers should begin with simple patterns and build complexity iteratively, ensuring the regex remains reliable, resilient, and performant. The process involves understanding the logical structure of regex, using specific patterns over generic ones, and optimizing for performance by avoiding greedy matches. A practical application discussed involves using regex to extract specific name-value pairs from log lines, which can appear in various orders and may include missing fields. The blog post further elaborates on using Grok patterns for cleaner log parsing in New Relic and highlights the importance of testing and optimizing regex to handle edge cases in log data. It concludes by encouraging continuous improvement of regex rules to enhance effectiveness for specific use cases.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), a modern distribution of Linux based on Fedora, which integrates with the latest AWS features and supports New Relic's agents, including Graviton architectures. This allows users to monitor their applications and infrastructure with confidence, improving performance and troubleshooting workflows. The New Relic platform offers a seamless monitoring experience for AL2023 users, enabling them to unify visibility across all infrastructure components, detect issues before they impact customers, pinpoint bottlenecks, and investigate anomalies. Users can install the New Relic infrastructure monitoring agent using a guided install or other methods such as prebaking AMIs, setting up best practices with AWS Control Tower, or automating deployments using scripts with AWS CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), which is compatible with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and is fully supported by New Relic's platform, including Graviton architectures, except for logging support from Fluent Bit, which is anticipated soon. The new distribution integrates the latest AWS features, ensuring a seamless monitoring experience for applications and infrastructure using New Relic's agents. Users are advised to upgrade from Amazon Linux 1, as support ended in 2020, to benefit from AL2023's capabilities. New Relic offers a guided installation process for deploying its infrastructure monitoring agent, allowing users to receive data quickly and improve troubleshooting workflows by integrating Amazon EC2 metrics into New Relic's observability platform. For large-scale deployments, methods like configuring instance launch settings, pre-building Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), and automating with AWS tools are recommended. Integrating AWS services with New Relic enhances full-stack observability by streaming Amazon CloudWatch telemetry data, allowing for efficient correlation and monitoring of cloud-based infrastructure and applications.

The New Relic OpenAI integration provides a seamless way to monitor OpenAI's GPT large language models like GPT-3 and GPT-4 at scale, helping ensure they are working as expected for important functions such as customer service and support. The integration offers real-time cost tracking and token consumption, average response time, total requests, user engagement metrics, and model performance analysis, enabling users to optimize usage, enhance ML models, reduce costs, and achieve better performance with their GPT models.

New Relic CodeStream is a tool designed to enhance software development by integrating performance monitoring directly into the developer's integrated development environment (IDE). By providing real-time access to code-level and service-level telemetry data, developers can proactively address application performance issues, improving the quality and reliability of their code without disrupting their workflow. CodeStream offers features like code-level metrics, which display essential performance indicators such as response time and error rates directly above code methods in the IDE, and service-level telemetry, which provides a broader view of how services interact and perform. This integration aims to accelerate release cycles by allowing developers to identify and resolve issues before they impact users, shifting the development process towards a more data-driven and informed approach.

Our company, Kurt Geiger, prepares for its two peak periods of European summer and Black Friday sales by reviewing tech, checking alert thresholds, and ensuring system coverage gaps are addressed. To improve performance, we focus on Core Web Vitals, a key metric that impacts website ranking in Google searches. We created a Core Web Vitals dashboard using New Relic to monitor our site's performance, identify areas for improvement, and track progress. This project has brought engineering, management, and digital teams together, promoting DevOps and end-to-end ownership, allowing us to build and monitor alerts, and ultimately leading to a significant improvement in our website's score from 45-50 to 85-90.

Kurt Geiger, a company managing multiple websites and retail operations, focuses on enhancing its digital performance, particularly during peak periods like European summer and Black Friday sales, by improving its Core Web Vitals scores to optimize website ranking and user experience. They implemented a program using New Relic to monitor and improve site performance, resulting in a significant increase in their Core Web Vitals score from 45-50 to 85-90. This initiative involved creating a dashboard for real-time performance monitoring and fostering collaboration between engineering, management, and digital teams. The project has empowered their DevOps teams to take end-to-end ownership of their processes, enhancing SEO capabilities and ensuring a superior customer experience, which has reduced customer complaints about site speed.

Statuspage is a status and incident communication tool that can be integrated with New Relic to provide additional data points on total downtime, helping developers find and fix issues faster. To achieve this integration, users need to set up their Statuspage account and create a synthetic scripted API test in New Relic, which periodically makes requests to the Statuspage API to retrieve component status data. This data can then be visualized in New Relic, enabling users to create dashboards and alerts that trigger when pages are no longer operational, providing insights into service uptime and helping developers proactively address issues.

Atlassian's Statuspage is a tool for status and incident communication that informs users about outages or maintenance, and it can be enhanced with New Relic's synthetic scripts to monitor service downtimes more effectively. This blog post offers a detailed guide on integrating Statuspage with New Relic by using a New Relic synthetic scripted API test, which enables users to obtain Statuspage uptime data, create alerts, and visualize data on dashboards within New Relic. It explains how to set up secure credentials for synthetic tests, perform queries to visualize component statuses, and create alerts for various statuses such as degraded performance or major outages. Moreover, it discusses the importance of monitoring external services and the advantages of having additional data points to ensure accurate downtime monitoring. The post also provides instructions on how to manage API limits and costs associated with synthetic tests, emphasizing the value of integrating Statuspage with New Relic for improved incident management and operational transparency.