September 2023 Summaries

In today's digital landscape, ensuring software security is crucial, and continuous vulnerability management offers a proactive approach to addressing evolving threats. This holistic defense strategy combines scanning, assessment, and remediation to identify, prioritize, and resolve vulnerabilities in real-time, allowing developers to stay ahead of the pace of agile development. By implementing continuous vulnerability management, organizations can enhance threat detection and prevention, improve risk management and compliance, adopt cost-effective security measures, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability, ultimately solidifying a robust security foundation for all software projects.

Hello everyone from New Relic, we're excited to introduce a fun opportunity for tech enthusiasts to share their experiences through memes and GIFs in an open thread called "What do you meme? Share your favorite tech memes" where you can post your tech-related memes and GIFs. Joining the fun is easy by replying to the post and attaching your favorite tech meme or GIF, exclusive Explorers Hub badges will be offered as a token of appreciation for participation. You can also create your own memes using a meme generator to personalize your tech moments and share them with the community. The Explorers Hub aims to foster a vibrant and engaging community through humor and we encourage you to join us exclusively at discuss.newrelic.com for questions and support related to this blog post.

Continuous Security RX is a proactive approach to maintaining software security in the fast-paced digital landscape, aligning closely with the rhythm of software development by offering real-time, iterative, and proactive measures. It consists of three main components: scanning, assessment, and remediation, which work together to identify, contextualize, and address security vulnerabilities effectively. By implementing continuous vulnerability scanning and assessment, developers can prioritize threats and focus on those with the highest impact, while remediation strategies ensure vulnerabilities are promptly resolved. This approach enhances threat detection and risk management, helps meet compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, and proves cost-effective by addressing security issues early. Continuous Security RX also supports ongoing improvement and adaptability in security measures, ensuring they evolve with emerging cyber threats. Implementing this strategy involves selecting appropriate tools, facilitating communication, integrating with broader security practices, and prioritizing education and feedback to ensure security is ingrained in the development process. Tools like New Relic can support this approach, providing a comprehensive security foundation for software projects.

New Relic has launched an engaging initiative called "What do you meme? Share your favorite tech memes," inviting tech enthusiasts to share their tech-related memes and GIFs in the Explorers Hub as a way to connect and share experiences humorously. Participants can reply to the post with their memes and GIFs, earn exclusive Explorers Hub badges, and even create their own memes using a meme generator. The Explorers Hub aims to foster a vibrant and engaging community, with humor playing a crucial role in enhancing the experience. The blog post also clarifies that the views expressed are personal to the author and not reflective of New Relic's official stance, and it encourages readers to join the Explorers Hub for further discussions and support.

The AWS CloudFormation tool is being integrated with New Relic to simplify and automate infrastructure provisioning and management for cloud-based applications. Customers can now use New Relic's resource types in their CloudFormation templates, allowing them to manage both AWS and New Relic infrastructure through a single platform. This integration enables customers to consolidate tooling and reduce the need for custom resource types. The new resources, such as Workloads, Alerts, and Dashboards, are currently available in the US East regions and can be made available in other regions upon request. The integration also leverages AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) constructs and AWS Config support to provide a more comprehensive management experience.

New Relic's log obfuscation feature protects sensitive data in logs by masking or hashing it to prevent exposure. This is crucial in an era where personal identifiable information (PII) like names, passwords, and social security numbers are highly sought after. Log obfuscation can be achieved through the use of New Relic's masking technique, which completely removes sensitive information and replaces it with "X" characters, or hashing technique, which converts sensitive data into a cryptic value that can be retrieved later. The feature is available in New Relic's Data Plus account and allows developers to create obfuscation rules based on specific regex patterns, enabling them to secure PII in their logs. By using log obfuscation, developers can protect sensitive data from being exposed, even with access to the application and production environment, or through integrated third-party monitoring tools.

AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code tool that streamlines the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure, offering users the ability to utilize templates to model their resources. The integration of New Relic's resource types into the CloudFormation Public Registry allows users to manage both AWS and New Relic infrastructure seamlessly, with the benefit of leveraging functionalities such as drift detection. Eight new resources have been added, enabling the creation, updating, and deletion of New Relic Alerts, Dashboards, and Workloads as GraphQL objects. These resources are publicly available as third-party extensions across various AWS regions, with additional regions accessible upon request. Furthermore, New Relic resources support AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) Constructs and AWS Cloud Control API (CCAPI), facilitating consistent CRUDL operations and enhancing the management and security of cloud infrastructure. AWS Config additionally supports automatic tracking of New Relic resource types, allowing for comprehensive auditing and inventory management.

In an age where personal identifiable information (PII) such as names, passwords, and social security numbers are increasingly vulnerable to exposure, proper data protection practices are crucial. The article highlights the role of developers in safeguarding data within applications, particularly through the use of log obfuscation techniques provided by platforms like New Relic. Developers can use New Relic’s log obfuscation feature to automatically or selectively mask and hash sensitive information to prevent unauthorized access, thereby enhancing data security. Masking involves replacing sensitive data with unsearchable "X" characters, while hashing converts data into cryptic values that can be retrieved later. The article guides users on implementing these techniques within New Relic, emphasizing the importance of properly securing PII to prevent potential crimes such as unauthorized financial activities. It also touches on the advanced features available to users with a Data Plus account, allowing for the creation of custom obfuscation rules to secure unique data patterns.

New Relic Session Replay bridges the gap between user interactions and developer toolkit by providing a visual playback of user sessions alongside granular telemetry data, enabling developers to reproduce and resolve issues faster. This tool offers enhanced privacy controls, replay captures for various use cases, and extended data retention for compliance purposes. It helps better understand front-end experiences, identify pain points, and enhance overall user experience. Session Replay also empowers customer support teams by providing context to resolve issues efficiently, while protecting user data with client-side obfuscation and encryption. The tool is now generally available as part of New Relic's all-in-one observability platform, offering a range of capabilities including session replay, APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs management, custom dashboards, errors inbox, tracing, change tracking, and more.

New Relic Session Replay has been launched as a feature within New Relic's comprehensive observability platform to enhance user experience analysis and support efficient issue resolution. This tool provides a video-like playback of user interactions, allowing developers to view detailed telemetry data and user actions, which helps in diagnosing and resolving issues more effectively. It captures 100% of user interactions leading to major incidents while maintaining low cost and offers privacy controls to protect sensitive data. Session Replay also aids customer support teams by offering visual context for troubleshooting, thus improving customer satisfaction. Additionally, it supports compliance through options for extended data retention and integrates with New Relic’s existing monitoring tools, empowering developers to create more intuitive and user-friendly applications.

The integration of Mux and New Relic offers enhanced observability across the entire customer video experience, providing a unified measurement approach that unlocks simultaneous client-side and backend observability, facilitating faster resolution through streamlined root cause analysis. This comprehensive monitoring solution covers the entire streaming workflow, enabling businesses to proactively improve service quality with alerts on signals like viewer count changes and playback failures correlated with client-side signals. By bringing together video analytics from Mux with full-stack observability from New Relic, customers can analyze user sessions in full detail, monitor performance across devices, and identify potential system failures and bottlenecks along the entire delivery chain. The integration provides a complete view of the technology ecosystem, enabling users to expedite root cause detection and troubleshooting cycles, ultimately leading to increased viewer engagement and revenue generation.

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, media and entertainment businesses face immense pressure to maintain optimal viewer experiences and seamless backend operations, especially as Americans stream over 169 billion minutes of video content weekly. To address this challenge, New Relic has partnered with Mux to enhance observability across the entire customer video experience, providing a unified measurement approach that facilitates simultaneous client-side and backend observability. This integration, available at no additional cost to New Relic users, combines Mux's video analytics with New Relic's full-stack observability to proactively improve service quality, analyze user sessions in detail, and monitor performance across various devices. By consolidating data sets, this partnership enables engineering and operations teams to prioritize impactful activities, reduce troubleshooting time, and maintain high-quality experiences, ultimately increasing viewer engagement and revenue. The setup process is simplified through an automated CloudFormation template, streamlining the configuration for users to integrate Mux data with New Relic, and offering a comprehensive monitoring solution that identifies potential system failures and bottlenecks throughout the streaming workflow.

At New Relic, they are sharing their best practices and patterns in observability through a new blog series called "Expert Observability". They believe that observability should be incorporated into all stages of the development lifecycle and have seen its benefits in reducing incident duration and improving business outcomes. The goal is to help engineers around the world leverage observability to improve their business, with each monthly blog written by an expert engineer who uses monitoring data daily to solve unique problems. They encourage readers to bring these best practices back to their own companies and provide resources for questions and support related to this blog post in the Explorers Hub.

To transform data from a flattened format into a more organized structure with multiple rows for each item, a utility called `jq` can be used to manipulate the JSON output. The transformation involves using the `to_entries`, `map`, and other functions within `jq` to reorganize the data. This approach allows for easier summarization, querying, sorting, selecting, and displaying of the data in New Relic. The process enables developers to collect and analyze telemetry data from various sources, including the Pi-hole DNS platform, and transform it into actionable insights that drive thoughtful action within their organization.

This article discusses how to configure bulkheads and circuit breakers in a way that prevents cascading failures in systems with multiple external services. Bulkheads are essentially connection pools that prevent a single failing service from taking down the entire system, while circuit breakers detect when a service is failing and automatically disconnect it until it's fixed. The article provides a framework for finding the right configuration for bulkhead systems, using Semian, a unified low-effort tool that adds circuit breakers and bulkheads to network requests automatically. It covers topics such as data collection, filtering, finding a good baseline time range, playing a guessing game to determine the optimal bulkhead value, and how to adjust the configuration based on historical data. The article emphasizes the importance of using historical data to find viable numbers before deploying the system to production, and encourages readers to continue monitoring these numbers after deployment.

The text explores the implementation and tuning of bulkheads and circuit breakers to enhance service reliability by preventing one struggling component from affecting the entire system. The focus is on configuring bulkheads correctly, as incorrect settings can lead to subtle but significant service disruptions. Using the Ruby library Semian as an example, the author provides guidance on gathering and analyzing telemetry data to determine the optimal configuration for bulkheads and connection pools. The article emphasizes the importance of historical data in setting effective bulkhead values and offers practical advice on monitoring and adjusting these settings in production. The author, Chuck Lauer Vose, encourages feedback and highlights the necessity of ongoing monitoring to maintain service performance, especially when changes occur in system configuration or external services are introduced.

The blog post by Leon Adato, a developer relations advocate at New Relic, discusses the challenges and solutions related to handling JSON data output from the Pi-hole DNS platform. The article highlights the common issue where data meant to be recorded in sequential rows often ends up spread across multiple fields, leading to variability and complexity in data analysis. Adato showcases the use of the jq utility to transform this data into a more organized format suitable for querying and display in New Relic, particularly for metrics such as top domains and advertisers, top DNS query sources, and query types. The post emphasizes the flexibility of New Relic's platform in not only collecting telemetry but also transforming it into actionable insights, and encourages readers to explore these capabilities by providing a complete YAML file example for integration. Additionally, it invites developers to improve their data handling processes by leveraging these tools and offers a free New Relic account for hands-on experience.

New Relic has launched a blog series titled "Expert Observability," aimed at sharing best practices in observability, which is seen as crucial throughout the development lifecycle. The series will feature monthly contributions from New Relic engineers who are experts in using monitoring data to solve problems, aiming to help engineers worldwide leverage observability to improve business outcomes. The initiative underscores the importance of effective monitoring and alerts in reducing incident duration, preventing issues, and driving business improvements, while also highlighting how tuned monitoring can facilitate auto-scaling and fail-over mechanisms. The content, provided by Ashley Puls, VP of Engineering at New Relic, emphasizes that the opinions are her own and not necessarily those of the company, and encourages readers to engage with the community for further discussion.

The 2023 Observability Forecast report provides insights into the habits and impact of observability investments among technology professionals across 15 countries. The report reveals that organizations are adopting observability to achieve core business objectives, resulting in tangible benefits such as fewer outages, improved service-level metrics, operational cost savings, and increased revenue. Full-stack observability is becoming increasingly popular, with a 58% year-over-year increase, and its adoption is likely driven by the value it unlocks for organizations. Observability also boosts productivity, enabling faster issue detection and resolution, and helps achieve technical and business key performance indicators (KPIs). However, ignoring observability can have significant financial consequences, including higher operational costs, revenue loss from downtime, and a negative impact on reputation and competitive positioning. The report emphasizes the importance of observability as a necessity for businesses to drive efficiency, security, and profitability.

Investing in observability is crucial for businesses seeking greater efficiency, security, and profitability, as highlighted in the 2023 Observability Forecast report, which gathered insights from 1,700 technology professionals across 15 countries. The report emphasizes the significant return on investment (ROI) from observability, with organizations reporting reduced outages, improved service levels, operational cost savings, and increased revenue, evidenced by a median annual ROI of 2x. Full-stack observability, although not yet universally adopted, is gaining momentum, with expectations for widespread deployment by mid-2026, as it enhances service-level metrics such as mean time to resolution and detection. Observability is seen as both a productivity booster for practitioners and a strategic asset for IT decision-makers, helping achieve key performance indicators. Ignoring observability, however, poses financial risks, with increased operational costs and potential revenue loss from downtime, as indicated by 96% of respondents. The report underscores that observability is a necessity, not a luxury, for improving business outcomes and maintaining competitive advantage in a complex digital environment.

The New Relic Impact Fund has awarded four grants to innovative nonprofits tackling critical technology projects in their digital transformation journeys. The recipients, Allies Against Slavery, Closegap, FishWise, and Trek Medics, were selected for their thoughtful solutions, commitment to driving efficiency and innovation through technology, and ability to provide sustainable solutions. The grants will support the development of data platforms, school rostering processes, seafood supply chain modernization, and emergency dispatch platforms, addressing pain points in nonprofit operations and promoting equitable access to technology. By investing in these projects, New Relic aims to inspire others in the industry to prioritize technology capacity for nonprofits, fostering a more equitable digital transformation journey.

The New Relic Impact Fund, in its second year, has awarded $25,000 grants to four nonprofit organizations as part of its commitment to enhancing digital transformation and equitable access to technology. This initiative aims to address the critical need for unrestricted funding in technology projects, often overlooked by grant makers. The selected organizations—Allies Against Slavery, Closegap, FishWise, and Trek Medics—are being recognized for their innovative solutions in areas ranging from combating human trafficking to improving mental health support in schools, enhancing seafood supply chain traceability, and coordinating emergency services. Each project focuses on leveraging technology to drive efficiency, innovation, and sustainable solutions, with the hope of inspiring similar philanthropic efforts in the industry.

The author of this text struggled with manipulating numeric data that came formatted as a string from an API, specifically Pi-hole's API. They initially encountered issues using NRQL functions like `numeric()` to convert the strings into numbers, but found limitations in handling formatted numbers and commas. After collaborating with colleagues, they discovered a more flexible approach by leveraging the `aparse()` function to split the data and then recombining it using `concat()`. However, the most elegant solution turned out to be using the `jq` command in Flex to perform complex string manipulations, including splitting, joining, and converting numbers. The author emphasizes the importance of asking for help and learning from colleagues, rather than being afraid of weakness. They also highlight the need to consider alternative solutions and not overcomplicate problems. Ultimately, they found that Pi-hole's API had a raw data output option that eliminated the need for further manipulation.

In a blog post by Leon Adato, a Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, he shares his journey of transforming numeric data formatted as strings into usable numbers for data analysis in New Relic. Initially, Adato attempted to use the New Relic Query Language (NRQL) function numeric() to convert strings to numbers, but he encountered challenges with formatted numbers containing commas. With the help of colleagues, he explored using NRQL's aparse() function and jq within New Relic Flex to manipulate the data more effectively, allowing for the removal of commas and conversion to numbers. However, the true solution was found in a simpler approach: using Pi-hole's option to output raw, unformatted data directly suitable for New Relic's requirements, bypassing the need for complex transformations. This experience underscores the value of collaboration and the importance of aligning with existing tools' functionalities rather than forcing preconceived ideas onto them.

NGINX is a powerful and high-performance web server that can be challenging to troubleshoot when issues arise. New Relic offers a comprehensive observability platform that provides real-time performance data, visualizations, and analytics to help diagnose and resolve problems quickly. By leveraging the New Relic platform, developers and DevOps teams can identify issues such as high latency, slow response times, 502 Bad Gateway errors, 504 Gateway Timeout errors, and SSL/TLS configuration issues, and take informed action to resolve them. With the right tools and insights, troubleshooting NGINX becomes much more manageable, allowing users to ensure their server remains performant and provides a secure user experience.

The integration of API observability with monitoring tools like New Relic's Flex integration tool can provide valuable insights into application performance, enabling developers to troubleshoot issues before they arise. By collecting data from APIs, including metrics, events, logs, and traces, developers can gain a holistic view of their application's health. The Pi-hole API serves as an example of how this can be done, with its JSON output being easily integrated with New Relic using the Flex integration tool to provide further insight into network performance. This allows teams to create interactive dashboards to visualize and analyze data, enabling real-time visibility, proactive monitoring, and advanced features like distributed tracing and error tracking.

BlackLine is a cloud-based enterprise software company that automates and controls the financial close process for companies, which relies heavily on the performance of its monitoring tools to ensure seamless operations. The company was using nine different tools to monitor its stack but found it difficult to get a unified view due to fragmentation and high alert volumes. After switching to New Relic, they were able to reduce monitoring tools to one, improve detection times by 50%, and detect issues before they made it into production, resulting in an estimated saving of $16 million per year via proactive monitoring. The new solution also enabled the company to build applications with real-time feedback on usage, reducing the cognitive load for engineers and improving overall customer satisfaction.

NGINX, a high-performance web server, reverse proxy server, and load balancer, often requires troubleshooting which can be efficiently managed using the New Relic observability platform. This platform provides real-time performance data, visualizations, and analytics, making it an ideal tool for diagnosing common NGINX issues such as high latency, 502 Bad Gateway errors, 504 Gateway Timeout errors, and SSL/TLS configuration problems. By utilizing New Relic's application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and synthetics capability, users can identify bottlenecks, analyze server performance, and test SSL/TLS configurations to ensure optimal server performance. The article emphasizes the importance of having a New Relic account and installing the New Relic agent on the NGINX server to leverage these troubleshooting capabilities.

APIs are crucial for modern application design, providing observability data that can be analyzed to monitor and improve application performance. This blog post explores the use of New Relic's Flex integration tool to seamlessly collect and analyze API data, offering insights into application health through metrics, events, logs, and traces. The Flex tool's integration capabilities are demonstrated using a web-based API from Pi-hole, showcasing how JSON data can be formatted and visualized in New Relic to enhance network performance insights. While API monitoring focuses on real-time metrics tracking, API observability provides a deeper understanding of API behavior and interactions, enabling proactive issue detection. New Relic offers real-time visibility, interactive dashboards, proactive monitoring through AI alerts, and advanced features like distributed tracing and error tracking, making it an optimal tool for enhancing API observability. The post encourages users to explore API data within New Relic, highlighting the platform's user-friendly interface and its potential to drive business success through improved API performance.

BlackLine, a cloud-based enterprise software company, leverages New Relic to enhance its financial close process by automating and controlling the monitoring of its extensive application stack, which includes monolithic applications, microservices, and third-party applications. Initially using multiple monitoring tools led to fragmented views and high cognitive loads for engineers, especially during incidents. The integration of New Relic helped streamline operations by consolidating data, reducing the number of alerts, and improving mean time to detection (MTTD). This proactive monitoring approach allows BlackLine to detect issues before they impact customers, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing costs. New Relic's user-friendly interface and pricing model based on data ingestion rather than per host make it a cost-effective solution, offering significant return on investment by saving BlackLine an estimated $16 million annually. The platform also supports the evolution of software engineering practices within BlackLine, providing real-time feedback and enabling the creation of dashboards and alerts through New Relic Query Language (NRQL).

Giving Tuesday is a global movement that promotes charitable giving, and nonprofits can benefit from planning and preparation to ensure their systems are ready for high-traffic moments. To achieve this, nonprofits can follow tips such as knowing the current state of their environment, establishing baselines and defining success, testing ability to meet baselines under stress, making contact centers happy, adding capacity if needed, optimizing payment processes, staying flexible, reviewing and reflecting on performance data, and celebrating success. By following these tips, nonprofits can capture more opportunities and make donors happy. New Relic provides tools and support to help nonprofits achieve this, including special discounts and extra support for Observability for Good program customers.

Giving Tuesday is a global initiative that encourages charitable donations on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving, similar to how Cyber Monday promotes shopping. Nonprofits are advised to prepare thoroughly for this high-traffic event to enhance donor satisfaction and capture maximum opportunities. Key strategies include assessing current system performance, establishing baselines, stress-testing systems, and optimizing payment processes, all while maintaining flexibility to adapt to real-time changes. Utilizing New Relic's observability tools, such as dashboards and synthetic monitoring, can help nonprofits manage and improve their systems. Collaboration with contact centers and adding capacity if needed are crucial steps. Post-event, organizations should conduct a blameless review to identify areas for improvement, and celebrate their successes, akin to maintaining peak performance as one would train for a marathon. Nonprofits participating in New Relic's Observability for Good program may receive special discounts and support, and are encouraged to join discussions for additional guidance.