February 2024 Summaries

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed service that simplifies the development and deployment process for containerized applications, allowing developers to leverage Kubernetes for container orchestration while benefiting from scalability, security, and ease of use provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The integration with New Relic EKS add-on offers seamless cluster monitoring and management, eliminating the need for manual commands to install helm charts on EKS. With the add-on, developers can easily deploy their operator on the EKS cluster, automatically installing Kubernetes integration without upgrading to the latest version of the New Relic bundle. The add-on provides visibility into Kubernetes clusters and workloads, helping to monitor and manage clusters with effortless installation.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed service that streamlines the development and deployment of containerized applications by utilizing Kubernetes for container orchestration, while leveraging AWS's scalability, security, and ease of use. A recent integration allows the New Relic EKS add-on to be directly accessed via the EKS Marketplace, simplifying the instrumentation process of the New Relic agent using the AWS CLI and eliminating the need for manual command execution. This integration facilitates seamless cluster monitoring and management, as the New Relic EKS add-on allows for automatic deployment of monitoring capabilities on EKS clusters without needing updates to the latest New Relic bundle version. The add-on offers visibility into Kubernetes clusters and workloads, encouraging users to further explore Kubernetes monitoring and the capabilities of the New Relic platform, with an option to sign up for a free New Relic account for enhanced data ingestion and user features.

New Relic Live Archives is a game-changing long-term log storage solution that offers affordability, ease of use, and performance, combining the benefits of hot and cold storage to help businesses comply with industry regulatory requirements while meeting compliance risks. It provides seamless query access to historical logs without delay, eliminates manual steps associated with traditional solutions, reduces costs, and streamlines the process into a few simple steps, making it an ideal solution for managing long-term log storage and analysis.

New Relic has launched Live Archives, a novel long-term log storage solution that offers a cost-effective, instantly queryable method for managing compliance risks and meeting regulatory requirements across various industries, including healthcare and finance. The solution addresses the challenges of traditional hot and cold storage options, which often involve costly and complex data management processes. By keeping logs in an active, hydrated state for up to seven years, Live Archives enables users to analyze historical data without the need for rehydration or re-indexing, resulting in seamless access and reduced costs compared to other long-term storage solutions. This system allows organizations to efficiently handle compliance requirements without the operational hassles typically associated with traditional storage methods, making Live Archives a compelling choice for businesses looking to maintain regulatory compliance while minimizing storage expenses.

New Relic offers a robust solution for monitoring and securing HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Vault by providing real-time insights, comprehensive observability, and dynamic alerting to help organizations elevate their secrets management on the platform. The solution enables teams to monitor and correlate metrics and logs, identify bottlenecks, and optimize processes, while also facilitating compliance efforts through visibility into authentication attempts, authorization, changes made to secrets or configurations, and access-control activities. With New Relic's end-to-end observability across the entire HCP Vault environment, organizations can gain immediate insights to address potential issues promptly, ensuring a resilient secrets management infrastructure.

HCP Vault, a managed service by HashiCorp, facilitates quick deployment and management of Vault for organizations seeking secure handling of sensitive data and secrets. New Relic enhances HCP Vault's capabilities by offering comprehensive monitoring and observability, providing real-time insights, dynamic alerting, and customizable dashboards to optimize performance and security. This synergy enables organizations to maintain a resilient infrastructure, monitor key metrics such as CPU and memory usage, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements by tracing unauthorized access or changes. New Relic's monitoring solutions help organizations preemptively address potential issues, safeguard against suspicious activities, and streamline compliance audits, all while offering scalability and risk mitigation.

As a zero-day vulnerability in Fortinet's FortiOS highlights the constant need for developers to stay ahead of security threats, New Relic application performance monitoring (APM) empowers them to create targeted alert rules and control their security posture without extensive scanning. By leveraging the APM and Vulnerability Management capabilities, developers can receive real-time alerts on zero-day events, gain broad visibility across their entire environment, assess the impact instantly, and maintain an ongoing, adaptive security posture through continuous analysis and proactive prevention. With New Relic's alerting and applied intelligence features, developers can create customized alert rules to address specific CVEs, navigate the Alert Conditions tab, define conditions based on parameters like error rates or response times, and integrate Vulnerability Management to extend their alert rules. By harnessing these capabilities, developers can unlock the full potential of New Relic APM for proactive security postures and stay ahead of the ever-changing digital landscape.

The New Relic team has removed inspected count (IC) limits for all customers, eliminating dropped queries due to IC limits and 15-minute wait times for limits to reset. This change allows for a doubling of query capacity without rejected queries once new limits are reached. The removal of IC limits is made possible by significant changes under the hood of New Relic's database (NRDB), including a migration to the public cloud, cellular architecture, and near-real-time feedback mechanisms that detect and respond to individual user workloads. These changes enable more efficient resource utilization, improved query availability and performance service level objectives, and a better experience for all customers without imposing limits on any of them.

To ensure great customer outcomes from digital services, organizations need an observability strategy that balances investment with value delivery. The 2023 Observability Forecast highlights key findings on adoption patterns and value realization, suggesting that investing in training teams, achieving full-stack observability, reducing data silos, and integrating business perspectives can unlock significant benefits. By adopting these strategies, organizations can improve outage frequency and costs, increase productivity, and innovate with confidence, ultimately delivering a higher level of value to the business.

New Relic has significantly improved its database system, NRDB, by removing inspected count (IC) limits, a measure previously used to manage query costs based on data point inspections. The removal of these limits allows for uninterrupted queries and eliminates the 15-minute wait time for reset, thereby doubling query capacity and enhancing user experience. This change follows a transition from a traditional data center architecture to a cloud-based cellular architecture, which enables isolated query compute clusters to dynamically redistribute workloads. This advancement, along with near-real-time feedback mechanisms, prevents any single tenant from monopolizing resources, thus ensuring fair resource utilization and improved service level objectives by two orders of magnitude. While some limits still exist, they are more focused and responsive, resulting in a better experience for most users who are unlikely to notice them.

Observability is crucial for ensuring the performance and reliability of digital services, but organizations must strategically invest in tools and training to maximize value. The 2023 Observability Forecast by New Relic highlights that organizations with full-stack observability experience improvements in mean time to resolution (MTTR) and reduced outage frequency and costs. Investing in staff training and reducing data silos can enhance productivity and reduce unnecessary spending. A thorough observability strategy extends beyond maintaining visibility into technological components, integrating business perspectives to understand the true impact of software on business outcomes. Companies are encouraged to regularly evaluate and adjust their observability practices to align with business goals, leveraging tools like New Relic's Pathpoint to bridge the gap between technical insights and business value.

Amid the dynamic field of cybersecurity, the revelation of a zero-day vulnerability in Fortinet's FortiOS underscores the ongoing battle between network defenders and attackers, highlighting the importance of proactive vulnerability management. New Relic's application performance monitoring (APM) empowers developers to establish zero-day vulnerability alerts, helping them enhance security postures without relying on extensive scanning. By integrating tools like Security RX, New Relic provides developers with capabilities such as real-time alerts, broad visibility across environments, and continuous analysis, which streamline the process of vulnerability detection and management. The platform's alert conditions and policies allow for the creation of targeted alert rules, ensuring timely notifications of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs), while features like the New Relic Database (NRDB) and Environment Snapshot tab record all changes for comprehensive security oversight. This proactive approach not only facilitates immediate response to vulnerabilities but also aids in preventing potential security issues, optimizing development workflows, and promoting a culture of accountability and transparency within development teams.

The noisy neighbor problem in multi-tenant software systems can be mitigated by adding custom instrumentation to track tenant IDs and leveraging New Relic's capabilities to diagnose issues quickly and efficiently. This allows operators to identify problems caused by a single tenant impacting the overall performance of the system, such as thread pool exhaustion or abnormally large amounts of traffic. By facetting telemetry data by tenant ID, operators can create dashboards and queries to track customer usage patterns, understand resource utilization, and put limits in place to prevent noisy neighbor issues and control costs. This enables multi-tenant software systems to be more performant, resilient, and cost-effective to operate.

Java application performance is crucial for maintaining productivity and business efficiency, as poorly performing applications can lead to various challenges such as increased costs and lost revenue. Java performance monitoring involves analyzing runtime behavior to identify bottlenecks, utilizing tools such as JVM monitoring, profiling, and garbage collection analysis to ensure optimal performance. Key strategies for improving Java application performance include optimizing Java code—by avoiding recursion, using StringBuilder, preferring stack allocations, choosing the right garbage collector, and addressing slow critical regions—and employing application performance monitoring tools like New Relic to gain real-time insights into performance metrics and issues. These tools offer comprehensive visibility, allowing developers to optimize code and improve application efficiency effectively. Integrating observability tools can enhance the ability to monitor, alert, and efficiently manage Java applications, ensuring they meet performance standards and business needs.

Multi-tenant architectures in SaaS businesses offer operational benefits by managing multiple tenants with a single instance, but they also face challenges such as the "noisy neighbor" problem, where one tenant's behavior can affect the system's overall performance. Effective observability, such as using New Relic's tools, is crucial for diagnosing these issues and understanding tenant usage. Custom instrumentation, telemetry data faceting by tenant ID, and creating dashboards for easy monitoring are strategies to address these challenges. These techniques allow operators to identify resource-intensive tenants and adjust system limits to enhance performance, resilience, and cost-effectiveness. Furthermore, New Relic supports the creation of custom metrics and provides capabilities for tracking user impact, helping businesses optimize their operations and align costs with revenue.

New Relic, an observability company, has automated its software agent release process for Kubernetes integration through fully automated GitHub Actions workflows, reducing deployment time from two weeks to just over an hour per week. This automation also enables the detection of security vulnerabilities in their codebase, allowing them to patch fixes without human interaction, resulting in a faster response time to security incidents. Additionally, they provide cutting-edge support for the latest version of Kubernetes by fully automating dependency management and conformance testing, ensuring they can update their integrations quickly and efficiently. They also sync their agent release with AWS EKS Anywhere Add Ons and automate changelog, communications, and documentation updates, improving transparency and efficiency throughout their development process.

New Relic has implemented a fully automated software agent release process for their Kubernetes agent, which significantly reduces deployment time from two weeks to one hour per week. This automation includes GitHub Actions workflows for managing dependencies, documentation, and partner synchronization, as well as code-scanning tools like CodeQL and Trivy to swiftly address security vulnerabilities. The company has enhanced its continuous integration (CI) pipeline to ensure quick adaptation to new Kubernetes versions by automating dependency management and conformance testing. Additionally, New Relic supports the Amazon EKS Anywhere Partner program by keeping its Kubernetes agent aligned with the latest releases through automated pull requests and notification systems. This approach not only ensures more secure and cutting-edge software for customers but also streamlines communication with stakeholders through automated updates and documentation.

Code-level vulnerabilities are like misplaced puzzle pieces that can weaken the entire structure of software, posing significant risks such as security breaches and data loss. These vulnerabilities arise from various sources, including coding errors, insecure libraries, and inadequate security practices, and can have severe consequences like system crashes, exposure of sensitive information, and unauthorized access. To manage these vulnerabilities, it's essential to identify and understand their nature, employ practical strategies for prevention and mitigation, and leverage tools like New Relic for early detection and continuous monitoring. By adopting robust management strategies and integrating security as a fundamental part of the development process, organizations can significantly mitigate the risks associated with code-level vulnerabilities.

In the realm of software development, code-level vulnerabilities pose significant risks, potentially leading to security breaches, data loss, and reputational damage if not properly managed. These hidden flaws can originate from coding errors, insecure libraries, or poor security practices, with common types including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and buffer overflows. New Relic offers a powerful solution for identifying and managing these vulnerabilities through its real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, and advanced alerting systems, enabling teams to spot potential security issues early. Effective management involves containing identified vulnerabilities, applying patches, and employing security best practices such as least privilege and securing data both in transit and at rest. Regular code reviews, automated security scanning, and risk mitigation strategies are essential to reduce future vulnerabilities. Ultimately, the key to maintaining secure software lies in proactive identification, prompt response, and integrating security as a fundamental part of the development process, while continuously adapting to the evolving digital landscape.

A shift-left strategy in software development involves moving tasks and processes earlier in the lifecycle to focus on quality and prevention of issues, allowing for early detection and address of defects, enhanced collaboration between development and operations teams, empowered development teams, and improved product quality. This approach streamlines development workflows by integrating testing processes seamlessly into the overall development cycle, accelerates release cycles, and reduces debugging time and associated costs, ultimately leading to a more secure and high-quality software product. To adopt this strategy effectively, organizations should implement best practices such as employee training and skill development, using automation and continuous integration tools, overcoming cultural resistance and change management, and strategic selection of tools and technology. By doing so, they can transform their development processes, enhance collaboration, and deliver software with fewer defects in shorter time frames.

Application performance optimization (APO) is a set of practices designed to enhance the efficiency and responsiveness of applications, encompassing code optimization, server management, and user interface enhancements. By investing in APO, organizations can significantly enhance user satisfaction, drive business growth, and bolster brand reputation, with benefits including improved user experience, enhanced conversion rates, increased customer loyalty, positive impact on brand reputation, reduced bounce rates, and improved SEO rankings. To calculate the value of APO, businesses should measure app performance metrics, quantify the cost of poor performance, compare the return on investment against initial costs, and implement strategies such as performance testing and monitoring tools, code optimization techniques, server and network optimization strategies, and continuous monitoring and performance maintenance.

The text discusses the importance of application dependency mapping in modern IT management and DevOps. It explains that this process involves identifying, visualizing, and documenting relationships between different components within an IT ecosystem or business process to make it easier to trace issues through a specific business process or workflow. The benefits of application dependency mapping include improved visibility into IT infrastructure, enhanced decision-making processes, efficient resource allocation, enhanced security measures, and reduced downtime. To implement application dependency mapping effectively, organizations should follow best practices such as identifying critical applications and dependencies, conducting real-time monitoring and data accuracy, collaborating and documenting, updating regularly, and performing routine maintenance. By leveraging comprehensive solutions from New Relic, organizations can ensure that the key IT components that power their business remain up and working as efficiently as possible.

End-to-end monitoring is a comprehensive strategy that involves tracking and evaluating the entire lifecycle of a business process or an application, providing a complete view of the system from user interactions to backend infrastructure. It integrates beyond traditional monitoring approaches by offering a holistic view of the entire system, considering end-user experience, application performance, infrastructure health, and their interdependencies. This broader perspective allows businesses to identify root causes more efficiently and resolve issues before they escalate. Implementing end-to-end monitoring brings many benefits, including ensuring exceptional user experience, identifying and resolving bottlenecks in business processes, enhancing security and compliance measures, improving overall business efficiency and productivity, and exploring advanced tools like APM, infrastructure, synthetic monitoring, and proactive strategies for continuous performance baseline monitoring, predictive analytics, automation, and best practices for effective end-to-end monitoring.

Application performance optimization (APO) is a critical, ongoing process that enhances the efficiency and responsiveness of applications by focusing on elements like code optimization, server management, and user interface improvements to meet the evolving expectations of users. At its core, APO is designed to improve user experience, which in turn boosts user satisfaction, engagement, conversion rates, and brand reputation, ultimately contributing to business growth. Effective APO requires continuous monitoring and performance maintenance, employing strategies such as performance testing, code optimization, and server and network optimization. The return on investment for APO is substantial, as it reduces bounce rates, improves SEO rankings, and fosters customer loyalty and retention. Tools like New Relic provide real-time insights and comprehensive testing, supporting businesses in their APO initiatives.

End-to-end monitoring is a comprehensive approach that tracks the entire lifecycle of a business process or application, offering a holistic view from user interactions to backend infrastructure. This method contrasts with traditional monitoring, which often focuses on isolated components, by providing a complete system perspective that helps identify root causes and resolve issues before they escalate. Implementing end-to-end monitoring enhances user experience, operational efficiency, security, and compliance by offering real-time insights into user interactions and system performance. Tools like New Relic facilitate this process by providing application performance, infrastructure, and synthetic monitoring capabilities. Proactive monitoring strategies, such as continuous performance baseline monitoring and predictive analytics, enable early detection of potential issues, ensuring high availability and performance. For effective implementation, organizations should establish clear objectives, foster collaboration across teams, and integrate end-to-end monitoring into DevOps and agile workflows.

Application dependency mapping is a critical process in modern IT management and DevOps, enabling businesses to identify, visualize, and document the interconnections between various components within their IT ecosystems. This mapping significantly enhances visibility into IT infrastructure, aids in pinpointing issues, and reduces downtime by decreasing mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR). By visualizing these relationships, organizations can improve decision-making, optimize resource allocation, and bolster security measures. Real-time monitoring and predictive analysis further aid in the swift identification and resolution of potential issues, contributing to better disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Effective implementation of application dependency mapping involves choosing appropriate tools, addressing challenges in hybrid IT environments, and ensuring continuous learning and skill enhancement. The process can be facilitated by leveraging comprehensive solutions such as those offered by New Relic, which provide actionable insights and help maintain efficient operations by proactively identifying and addressing interdependencies across the IT landscape.

Threat modeling is a structured and strategic approach to identifying and mitigating potential security threats in software applications, emphasizing advanced tools and techniques to fortify applications against emerging threats. It's a proactive approach to security that involves thinking like an attacker to identify potential vulnerabilities in your application, ensuring that it's designed with security in mind from the outset. Integrating threat modeling into the software development lifecycle brings numerous benefits, including early detection of security issues, cost-effective risk management, and a security-focused design, ultimately reducing the likelihood of security breaches and data loss. Leveraging efficient and effective tools, such as automated threat modeling tools like New Relic, can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the threat modeling process, providing real-time insights into application performance, security, and operational health.

Threat modeling is a crucial aspect of application security, focusing on proactively identifying and mitigating potential vulnerabilities in software development. This approach emphasizes the importance of understanding the "attack surface" by thinking like an attacker, which helps developers anticipate and neutralize security threats. Integrating threat modeling early in the software development lifecycle allows for cost-effective risk management and ensures a security-focused design, significantly reducing the risk of breaches and data loss. Tools like New Relic enhance the process by providing real-time monitoring, performance analytics, and customizable dashboards, which facilitate the identification and mitigation of security threats. Automation and collaboration among stakeholders are key to effective threat modeling, enabling teams to adapt to evolving threat landscapes and maintain robust security practices. The blog also highlights the role of New Relic in supporting threat modeling through efficient tools and insights, underscoring the necessity of threat modeling in today's security-conscious environment.

The Achievers team built a load testing framework to improve platform performance and scalability. They set goals for throughput, errors, latency, and scalability, and used observability dashboards in New Relic to track progress. Throughput optimization involved using Istio Load Balancing to distribute traffic evenly among pods, while reducing errors by adding extra IP addresses and bumping port limits on the Google Cloud NAT. Latency improvements were made through code optimizations, including removing unnecessary database locks and upgrading endpoint performance. Caching improvements were achieved by moving images to a CDN and optimizing Redis cache usage. Scaling was ensured through adjusting IP address limitations and introducing topologySpreadConstraints to distribute critical services across worker nodes. The team successfully met their goals, improving throughput by 4x, reducing errors, and scaling the cluster effectively.

After implementing a load testing framework, Achievers significantly enhanced their platform's performance, increasing traffic throughput by four times and improving cluster scalability. The testing process identified bottlenecks related to throughput, errors, latency, and scalability, with solutions involving load balancing configurations, network adjustments, and code optimizations. The team addressed issues such as unbalanced gRPC traffic, client-side bottlenecks, and database latency, using tools like Istio and New Relic for insights. Improvements in caching and scaling were achieved by adjusting Kubernetes resources and IP address allocations, allowing for more efficient resource distribution and preventing resource exhaustion. Ultimately, the team met or exceeded their performance goals, ensuring robust handling of failover traffic and maintaining service level objectives, while establishing a flexible framework for ongoing performance testing.

New Relic AI is a platform that offers deep insights, automated alerting, and system optimization using large language models (LLMs) and unified telemetry data platform, aiming to make observability ubiquitous at any organization. To protect customer information, New Relic maintains a "privacy by design" approach, ensuring traditional security concerns like access controls, encryption, and vulnerability management are met, while also addressing additional risks introduced by generative AI technology. The company leverages Azure OpenAI's APIs to power its LLM without storing or using customer information. Data security considerations are addressed at each step of the architecture, including balancing context and privacy, leveraging public documentation, and proactively protecting customers. New Relic AI is committed to maintaining a proactive approach to data security, investing in talent, technology, and partnerships to ensure industry-leading security while delivering an industry-leading product.

New Relic AI aims to make observability accessible to all organizations by integrating large language models (LLMs) with a unified telemetry data platform, offering insights, automated alerting, and system optimization without a steep learning curve. Emphasizing data security and privacy, New Relic AI's development involved close collaboration with security, legal, and compliance teams to safeguard customer information at every stage, from initial prompts to final responses. The service carefully manages access rights and data retrieval, ensuring privacy by design and limiting access to necessary functions. It leverages Azure OpenAI for secure LLM capabilities and employs retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide contextual answers from public documentation without exposing user data. New Relic AI is designed to protect customer interactions by restricting conversation context to the active session, preventing cross-user data leaks. By continually assessing vendors and technological advancements, New Relic ensures that its generative AI solutions remain secure and privacy-focused, maintaining a proactive stance on emerging security challenges.

New Relic has integrated its network monitoring capabilities with Amazon CloudWatch Network Monitor, allowing users to troubleshoot connectivity issues in their hybrid networks more effectively. This integration enables customers to visualize network metrics such as packet loss and latency on New Relic dashboards, alongside other infrastructure and application monitoring metrics. By setting alert thresholds, teams can proactively notify themselves about anomalies and expedite resolution, minimizing downtime and optimizing network performance. The integration is available in New Relic Instant Observability, a large open ecosystem of integrations and tools designed to help engineers adopt observability as a daily practice.

Merging two tech stacks requires careful consideration of various factors including cost-effectiveness, scalability, cultural considerations, and tool preferences. The consolidation of Centralpoint's cloud-native stack with Dustin's modern application stack presented a challenge in choosing the right observability solution, which ultimately led to the decision to use New Relic due to its maturity and cost-effectiveness. Adopting a full in-house DevOps model and moving away from infrastructure-as-a-service mindset helped optimize resource utilization and improve team efficiency. Embedding security into applications through Vulnerability Management enabled teams to take ownership of their application's security status, reducing alert fatigue and improving incident response. The transition towards a DevSecOps approach requires cultural changes in teams' responsibilities and agile mindsets.

In 2021, Dustin, a leading online IT partner, acquired Centralpoint, prompting a complex consolidation of their distinct tech stacks, which featured different tools and architectures. Centralpoint, having transitioned to AWS in 2019, utilized New Relic extensively for application performance monitoring (APM) and logs, while Dustin relied on Datadog for infrastructure monitoring within a private cloud environment. Ultimately, the decision was made to adopt New Relic for the unified tech stack due to its cost-effectiveness, maturity, and existing engineering relationships, facilitating a transition towards a DevOps model with a focus on proactive incident response and security integration through New Relic's Security RX. This integration aims to embed security into the development process, empowering developers to manage application security and allowing for more agile operations. The transition also involves creating custom dashboards for better insights and leveraging New Relic's tools for maintaining application dependencies and monitoring Kubernetes clusters efficiently.

Network monitoring is essential for maintaining the reliability and security of systems, and New Relic's integration with Amazon CloudWatch Network Monitor enhances this capability by enabling users to troubleshoot connectivity issues across hybrid networks, specifically between AWS and on-premises environments via AWS Direct Connect. This integration allows for quick identification of network problems, whether they originate on-premises or within the AWS network, and facilitates rapid remedial actions. Amazon CloudWatch Network Monitor is a fully managed service that easily integrates into New Relic's platform, allowing users to visualize network health metrics like packet loss and latency alongside other infrastructure data on New Relic dashboards. Users can set alert thresholds to proactively manage anomalies and performance issues, with metrics streamed to New Relic through CloudWatch Metric Streams integration, making it part of New Relic's Instant Observability ecosystem. The service is designed to help engineers adopt observability as a regular practice, with resources and integrations available to enhance monitoring capabilities.

In today's digital landscape, a great user experience (UX) is crucial for businesses to succeed. UX refers to the overall experience a user has when interacting with a product or service. A well-designed UX can lead to increased customer loyalty, revenue, and engagement. User Experience Optimization (UXO) involves making data-driven improvements to enhance the user's experience. Real User Monitoring (RUM) records and analyzes digital customer interactions, providing insights into performance, errors, and latency. Businesses need to deliver a flawless coordination of multiple services and systems to ensure a great customer experience. With 80-90% of end-user wait time spent on the client side, businesses focused solely on uptime are missing opportunities to increase customer engagement and improve business results. RUM is essential for understanding how technology impacts customers and quantifying how slow sites impact customer funnel engagement, end-user tolerance, and business outcomes. Observability tools like New Relic can help businesses improve their users' experience by providing real-time data from real-user behavior with extensive details and correlation.

User experience (UX) encompasses the overall experience a user has with a product or service, which is crucial for business success as it affects customer satisfaction and retention. User experience optimization (UXO) involves leveraging data-driven insights to improve this experience, often through real user monitoring (RUM), which provides detailed analysis of how users interact with digital products. RUM focuses on measuring client-side performance and is essential for understanding and enhancing digital customer experiences, facilitating the detection and resolution of frontend errors and improving website performance. Tools like New Relic's observability platform enable businesses to monitor and optimize both frontend and backend systems, thus ensuring seamless digital interactions. As businesses increasingly rely on digital channels, effective RUM becomes a competitive differentiator, helping companies enhance customer satisfaction and engagement. New Relic offers comprehensive solutions, including browser and mobile monitoring, that provide detailed user-centric data, enabling rapid identification and resolution of issues, ultimately improving digital business outcomes.