April 2024 Summaries

New Relic uses custom events to track and analyze its own systems, with over 30% of telemetry data being custom events, compared to only 5% for typical customers. Custom events are schemaless and can be created at any time without advance registration, allowing users to record specific data points such as file uploads or modifications. This enables experimentation and data-driven decision-making, as well as performance benefits due to the smaller number of custom events compared to more generic types like spans and transactions. Unlike logs, custom events allow for direct recording of structured data in a format that can be easily queried using NRQL.

New Relic extensively utilizes custom events to tailor its telemetry data collection, setting it apart from typical customer use cases where standard instrumentation is preferred. Custom events in New Relic allow users to define their attributes and values without prior registration, leveraging the schemaless nature of the New Relic database for immediate querying. This flexibility enables New Relic to track specialized lifecycle events in its distributed database, providing valuable insights into system behavior. Custom events also facilitate experimentation and data-driven decision-making by allowing precise tracking and analysis of specific processes. Unlike logs, custom events are structured from the outset, negating the need for post-processing extraction and offering performance benefits due to their specificity and lower volume compared to generic events. Users can record custom events via New Relic's APM agents or Event API, and these events can be integrated into dashboards using NRQL.

Laravel is a widely-used, open-source PHP web framework known for its speed, scalability, and ease of use, providing developers with an array of tools to facilitate common web development tasks like routing and authentication. Ensuring the performance of Laravel applications is crucial for maintaining user satisfaction and business growth, as slow or inefficient applications can deter users and impact revenue. Various factors, such as poor code quality and server issues, can negatively affect performance, making it essential to monitor and optimize applications using strategies like updating to the latest PHP and Laravel versions, employing tools like Laravel Debugbar and New Relic for monitoring, leveraging Laravel Octane for faster application performance, and utilizing features like route caching and database caching. Implementing performance optimization techniques like dependency injection and monitoring database transactions can further enhance application efficiency, while tools like New Relic provide real-time insights to help developers address performance bottlenecks and maintain high application standards.

New Relic AI monitoring is a generative AI solution designed to democratize observability and provide unparalleled visibility into the entire AI application stack. With its industry-first application performance monitoring (APM) solution for AI, New Relic empowers organizations of all sizes to monitor, manage, and optimize their AI applications for performance, quality, and cost. The solution offers effortless instrumentation and onboarding, full-stack visibility for AI applications, quick identification of outliers in AI responses, root cause faster with deep trace insights, and optimization of performance and cost across models. Additionally, New Relic AI monitoring provides enhanced data security and user privacy features to ensure compliance and user safety. By leveraging this solution, organizations can confidently navigate the ever-evolving AI landscape and unlock the true potential of their AI initiatives.

New Relic AI monitoring is a groundbreaking solution designed to provide comprehensive observability and performance optimization for AI applications across various frameworks, including OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock. This innovative tool offers effortless integration and onboarding through auto-instrumentation capabilities that support multiple programming languages, facilitating seamless monitoring of AI models. With features like AI Model Inventory and AI model comparison, users gain complete visibility into model usage, performance, error rates, and costs, enabling informed decision-making and efficient troubleshooting. The platform's full-stack visibility, enhanced by integration with APM 360, provides a unified view of standard and AI-specific metrics, helping users optimize their AI environment for performance, quality, and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, New Relic AI monitoring ensures data security and user privacy through drop filter functionality and opt-out options, empowering organizations to safeguard sensitive information while maximizing the potential of their AI-driven initiatives.

Thinkific, a popular online education platform, has successfully integrated service level objectives (SLOs) into its organizational strategy to improve observability and drive data-driven decision-making. By consolidating monitoring tools, implementing KPIs for all services, reporting baselines and KPIs, mapping SLO user journeys, and fostering a culture of collective ownership, Thinkific has transformed its approach to observability, enabling the company to make data-driven decisions and prioritize technical work accordingly. With New Relic's service level objectives capabilities, Thinkific has established a comprehensive performance blueprint that all services can aspire to, grounding these objectives in measurable, impactful metrics like performance, uptime, and latency.

Thinkific has transformed from a small startup to a large organization by aligning its service level objectives (SLOs) with business metrics to improve organizational observability. By consolidating monitoring tools using New Relic, the company established a consistent approach to observability, reducing costs and enhancing infrastructure oversight. They implemented key performance indicators (KPIs) across services like student dashboards and e-commerce tools, focusing on reliability, performance, and uptime to enhance service level agreements (SLAs). Monthly reports and a traffic light system communicate performance metrics, enabling leadership to make informed decisions balancing innovation and optimization. Thinkific also maps user journeys to prioritize target segments and fosters a culture of shared responsibility, empowering all team members to contribute to the platform’s success. This observability-driven approach aims to continuously improve the educational experiences offered by Thinkific and its creator educators worldwide.

New Relic Mobile User Journeys is a critical component of their digital experience monitoring (DEM) solutions designed to enable proactive, strategic decision-making by providing comprehensive visibility into user interactions leading up to crashes and enabling developers to diagnose errors, understand root causes, and identify patterns and trends in recurring issues. This capability allows teams to instantly access every step of the mobile user journey to find and fix bugs faster, prevent potential disruptions before they affect the user experience, and make data-driven decisions that enhance the overall experience for users. By integrating with crash analysis, Mobile User Journeys streamlines issue resolution by providing context, pinpointing root causes, and enabling teams to prioritize and address critical problems first. The feature also allows teams to drill down and analyze individual user journeys for deeper insights into app versions, devices, OS, and carriers, ultimately leading to a consistently smooth user experience across all devices and configurations.

New Relic has introduced Mobile User Journeys, a component of their digital experience monitoring solutions, to enhance mobile app user experiences by providing developers and DevOps teams with comprehensive insights into user interactions. This tool allows for proactive decision-making by offering a detailed view of user journeys, helping identify bottlenecks, areas of friction, and opportunities for optimization to resolve issues before they affect users. By integrating with crash analysis, Mobile User Journeys streamlines the process of identifying and resolving crashes by visualizing user journeys leading up to crashes, allowing teams to pinpoint root causes and prioritize critical fixes. This capability not only aids in technical troubleshooting but also facilitates interface improvements, enhances app stability and performance, and ultimately boosts user satisfaction, retention rates, and revenue. By offering a unified view of the application stack, from frontend user experience to backend infrastructure, this tool is part of New Relic's broader mission to provide holistic observability solutions, thus ensuring a consistently high-quality user experience across all touchpoints.

Skyscanner uses an observability platform with OpenTelemetry (OTel) and other open standards to provide actionable insights into their distributed infrastructure. They employ game days, simulated real-world incidents, to train developers and improve incident management. These games help teams develop a general approach to problem-solving and identify areas where they need additional training on the observability platform. The format allows for a fun and interactive way to learn, with over 90% of participants expressing increased confidence in debugging their production systems. Skyscanner's experience is being used by New Relic to improve their product and services.

Skyscanner, a travel search aggregator, utilizes an observability platform enhanced by OpenTelemetry (OTel) and other open standards to tackle distributed infrastructure challenges, moving beyond traditional runbooks for incident management. By integrating OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) with New Relic, Skyscanner benefits from a unified standard for instrumentation, enabling advanced data sampling and reducing data ingestion time. To train developers, Skyscanner implements "observability game days," where teams simulate real-world incidents using the OTel demo and New Relic platform. These exercises, featuring a "wheel of misfortune" to randomly select incidents, foster autonomy and adaptability in problem-solving, allowing teams to devise their own solutions while receiving guidance from observability experts. This approach not only enhances their understanding of New Relic features but also identifies organizational gaps in tool usage. Feedback from participants highlights the effectiveness of game days in boosting confidence and skills in debugging production systems, with over 90% expressing interest in further such learning opportunities.

Securing application environments is crucial for organizations across all sectors due to the direct impact on operational security, regulatory compliance, and customer confidence. As software systems become more complex and integral to business operations, the task of identifying and addressing vulnerabilities within these systems has become a critical operational necessity. This guide outlines practical approaches for the identification and remediation of application vulnerabilities through observability, rigorous security assessments, and strategic response mechanisms. Understanding application vulnerabilities involves recognizing design flaws, coding errors, and configuration oversights that can be exploited by attackers. Common vulnerabilities include injection attacks, cross-site scripting (XSS), security misconfigurations, sensitive data exposure, and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). To ensure the integrity and security of application environments, organizations must adopt a structured approach toward identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities through comprehensive vulnerability assessments, analyzing application code and configuration, monitoring application logs and security events, and implementing best practices such as integrating security into CI/CD pipelines, employing comprehensive application testing, adopting threat modeling and least privilege principles, and automating security maintenance and penetration testing. However, navigating these complexities poses significant challenges and considerations for security professionals, including balancing security with user experience, integrating security practices into development, and continuously monitoring and maintaining security measures.

MLOps, short for Machine Learning Operations, is a practice that focuses on managing and streamlining the lifecycle of machine learning models, from development and testing to deployment and monitoring in production environments. It aims to bridge the gap between data science and operations teams, similar to how DevOps connects developers and operations, facilitating collaboration among data engineers, data scientists, and MLOps engineers. MLOps incorporates best practices, such as continuous integration and delivery, data version control, and robust security measures, to ensure the effective deployment of machine learning models while addressing challenges like model accuracy, robustness, and bias. Platforms like New Relic support MLOps by offering tools for monitoring and optimizing machine learning applications, providing full observability across the MLOps lifecycle and promoting a seamless integration of MLOps best practices into production workflows. As organizations increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to achieve business goals, MLOps becomes essential for ensuring reliable, scalable, and efficient machine learning systems, ultimately helping companies unlock new revenue sources, save time, and reduce operational costs.

Securing application environments is essential for organizations to maintain operational security, regulatory compliance, and customer confidence, especially as software systems become increasingly complex and vital to business operations. The process involves identifying and addressing vulnerabilities, such as injection attacks, cross-site scripting, security misconfigurations, sensitive data exposure, and cross-site request forgery, by adopting secure coding practices and implementing comprehensive testing and monitoring strategies. Key steps in identifying these vulnerabilities include conducting vulnerability assessments, analyzing application code and configuration, and monitoring application logs and security events. The integration of security practices into CI/CD pipelines, comprehensive application testing, threat modeling, and automation are best practices for enhancing application security. Challenges in modern application environments include managing a diverse array of technologies, balancing security with user experience, integrating security into development processes, and ensuring continuous monitoring and maintenance. By adopting strategic and integrated approaches, organizations can significantly enhance their application security posture and protect their data and services against potential threats.

New Relic is a key player in the shift-left movement, helping developers and DevOps engineers increase productivity through tools and best practices that facilitate a shift-left mindset. Key factors of DevOps productivity include code quality and maintainability, continuous integration and deployment pipelines, infrastructure and system performance, collaboration and communication, and monitoring and alerting. Leveraging New Relic observability solutions can improve productivity by providing insights into code execution, automating tasks, facilitating real-time visibility into metrics, promoting effective communication among teams, enabling proactive issue identification, and streamlining troubleshooting. Best practices to increase DevOps productivity include setting up effective monitoring and alerting, implementing a culture of continuous improvement, and regularly reviewing and refining development processes. New Relic solutions can help organizations enhance developer productivity and succeed in today's fast-paced software landscape by reducing mean time to resolution, enhancing release velocity, and improving the software development lifecycle.

As developers, we often struggle with log misplacement in our Docker applications, causing clutter and complications in monitoring and troubleshooting. To address this issue, Plushcap shares a roadmap to guide logs to their correct destinations in New Relic, ensuring that container logs are isolated from host logs and can be easily analyzed and diagnosed. By adjusting logging configurations, tagging containers, and setting up log parsing rules, developers can streamline their Docker logs in New Relic, enhancing their ability to respond to issues swiftly and gain data-driven insights into their applications' performance.

New Relic is actively supporting the "shift left" movement in the software industry by providing tools and best practices that enhance DevOps productivity. The blog post outlines key factors contributing to DevOps productivity, emphasizing the importance of code quality, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure performance, collaboration, and proactive monitoring and alerting. New Relic offers solutions like CodeStream for integrating observability data into developers' environments, full-stack monitoring for real-time visibility, and AI for efficient data analysis. These tools are designed to increase productivity by enabling faster issue resolution and enhancing the software development lifecycle. The post also highlights best practices for increasing productivity, including effective monitoring, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, and regularly refining development processes. These approaches, coupled with New Relic's solutions, aim to enhance developer productivity and help organizations succeed in the competitive software landscape.

The article explores the common issue faced by developers using Docker Compose with New Relic, where container logs are misdirected to the New Relic Host UI instead of the Container UI, complicating monitoring and troubleshooting efforts. It describes how this misplacement of logs leads to cluttered and unclear log management, likening it to finding a specific conversation in a crowded room. To address this, the article provides a detailed solution involving adjustments in logging configuration, tagging containers, and setting up log parsing rules in New Relic to ensure logs are correctly categorized and easily accessible. The author, Harry Kimpel, also shares his contributions to the OpenTelemetry demo application and updates to New Relic documentation to enhance log management practices, encouraging readers to experiment, share insights, and engage with the community for improved observability.

MEAN and MERN stacks are popular JavaScript-based web development frameworks that leverage Node.js across the entire stack, streamlining development and fostering code reuse. LAMP and LAMPy stacks combine powerful open-source technologies, providing scalability and flexibility. These stacks have garnered considerable traction, with Node.js being used by over 52% of professional developers, PHP consistently ranking among the top 5 most popular programming languages, and Python's popularity surging in recent years. MEAN, MERN, LAMP, and LAMPy stacks empower developers to build dynamic, scalable, and efficient web applications, offering cost-efficiency, streamlined development process, flexibility, continuous maintenance, and ubiquity. However, these stacks can present common challenges such as identifying performance bottlenecks, slow loading times, errors, database performance issues, and frontend responsiveness. New Relic quickstarts offer a streamlined approach to instrumenting your chosen stack and gaining deeper insights into your application's performance and health with pre-built dashboards and alerts.

The article highlights the significance of zero-day vulnerabilities and their potential impact on organizations worldwide. It emphasizes the importance of proactive measures in detecting and mitigating these threats, particularly with the help of advanced monitoring and detection tools like New Relic. The tool's capabilities, such as real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, and targeted alerting, enable teams to detect, analyze, and respond to vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Additionally, New Relic addresses open-source library risks and code-level vulnerabilities, providing detailed insights into application performance and system health. By leveraging these features, organizations can adopt a vigilant and proactive security posture, ultimately mitigating the risks associated with zero-day vulnerabilities.

Zero-day vulnerabilities pose a significant threat to organizations as they exploit unknown software flaws before developers can address them, leading to potential data breaches and system takeovers. These vulnerabilities are challenging due to their unpredictability and the sophisticated nature of associated attacks, often remaining undetected for extended periods. Traditional security measures are ineffective against zero-day threats, emphasizing the need for advanced monitoring and detection tools. New Relic offers a suite of monitoring and observability tools that aid in identifying and mitigating these vulnerabilities by providing real-time insights, anomaly detection, and targeted alerting. It addresses risks from open-source libraries by checking against known vulnerabilities and manages code-level threats through detailed application performance insights. New Relic's integration with incident response tools enhances rapid mitigation efforts, enabling organizations to adopt a proactive security posture. Effective defense against zero-day vulnerabilities requires continuous monitoring, rapid response, and strategic cybersecurity practices, combining technological tools like New Relic with comprehensive defense strategies for robust protection.

In the modern software landscape, web development stacks like MEAN, MERN, LAMP, and LAMPy have gained popularity due to their versatility, robustness, and ease of use, facilitating the creation of dynamic and efficient web applications. MEAN and MERN leverage JavaScript across the stack, while LAMP and LAMPy utilize powerful open-source technologies, contributing to their scalability and flexibility. However, as applications become more complex, observability becomes crucial, and New Relic quickstarts provide a streamlined solution for monitoring these stacks. These quickstarts offer pre-built dashboards and alerts, allowing developers to gain insights into application performance and health without extensive manual configuration. By using New Relic's quickstarts, developers can optimize performance, resolve issues, and enhance user experiences through continuous observability.

Security incidents and cyber-attacks are projected to reach $9.5 trillion in costs worldwide by 2024 and exceed $13 trillion by 2028, emphasizing the need for robust security observability in safeguarding applications against evolving threats. The MELT framework, which consists of metrics, events, logs, and traces, provides a comprehensive approach to security observability, enabling early detection and prevention of vulnerabilities by offering real-time insights into application behavior. Platforms like New Relic facilitate security observability by visualizing vulnerabilities, aiding in the detection of security issues such as authentication and access control vulnerabilities, brute force attacks, and external dependency risks. Tracing events, analyzing logs, and leveraging AI and machine learning tools enhance the ability to proactively address potential security threats, thereby strengthening an organization's security posture and response capabilities. The integration of observability tools not only helps in identifying and patching vulnerabilities but also supports incident response, threat modeling, and overall security posture assessment, making security observability an essential component of modern cybersecurity strategies.

Prometheus is an open-source tool developed by SoundCloud in 2012, now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, designed for real-time monitoring of applications, microservices, and networks, particularly beneficial for Kubernetes clusters. It collects time-series data using a dimensional data model and a pull-based mechanism, employs PromQL for querying, and integrates well with visualization tools like Grafana. Prometheus is scalable, supports numerous exporters for diverse systems, and has a robust alerting system, making it ideal for monitoring container orchestration, microservices, and cloud-native applications. While it excels in metric-based monitoring, it may require additional tools for comprehensive observability, and its effectiveness is enhanced when used alongside Grafana and platforms like New Relic, which offer advanced visualization and holistic system insights.

Secure authentication is crucial for protecting user information and enabling safe access to applications, and authentication logs play a vital role in this process. These logs record events related to user authentication and contain details such as login attempts, user identities, and IP addresses, which are essential for security monitoring, forensic analysis, compliance, and troubleshooting. Monitoring authentication logs helps detect security threats, login errors, and trends, and it is recommended to centralize logging, regularly review logs, and implement multi-factor authentication for enhanced security. New Relic offers an observability platform that simplifies the logging and monitoring process by automatically capturing application events, including authentication flows, and providing tools for analysis, pattern detection, and security risk evaluation. By using New Relic, organizations can efficiently manage authentication logs, detect critical vulnerabilities in third-party authentication tools, and ensure compliance and security through structured data analysis and prebuilt dashboards.