April 2025 Summaries

Shift left is a strategy in software development that involves moving tasks like testing and security checks to earlier stages in the product lifecycle to proactively identify and resolve issues, thus improving efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing product quality. By integrating testing and development into a continuous loop, this approach fosters collaboration between development, test, and security teams, promoting a culture of proactive issue resolution and continuous improvement. It contrasts with the shift-right strategy, which schedules these activities closer to production, often resulting in slower cycles and higher defect rates. Shift left is increasingly adopted in DevOps and CI/CD methodologies, with benefits such as early bug detection, accelerated release cycles, and improved product security, ultimately leading to higher user satisfaction. Implementing a shift left strategy involves overcoming challenges like cultural resistance and requires strategic selection of tools and technologies, such as automated testing frameworks and CI/CD platforms, to ensure successful integration into existing workflows.

Observability and monitoring are essential components of system management, each serving distinct roles in maintaining and improving system performance. Monitoring focuses on tracking predefined metrics and reacting to issues after they occur, providing real-time alerts and visualizations to help teams address immediate problems. Observability, on the other hand, extends beyond monitoring by proactively analyzing metrics, logs, traces, and other inputs using artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand the internal state of systems, predict potential issues, and identify root causes. In complex infrastructures, observability becomes crucial as it enables a deeper understanding of system behavior and allows for the automation of responses to issues before they affect users. Both tools are vital for DevOps and SRE teams, as they complement each other in providing actionable insights, enhancing system resilience, and optimizing the software lifecycle. Examples from organizations like ANZ Bank and William Hill demonstrate the practical benefits of implementing observability, including significant reductions in mean-time-to-repair and improved system performance.

Observability and monitoring are interconnected concepts crucial for maintaining system health, with monitoring focusing on predefined metrics to reactively identify issues and observability taking a proactive approach by analyzing data outputs such as logs, metrics, and traces to understand and predict system behavior. While monitoring is effective for simple systems with its automated alerts and visualizations, observability is essential for complex infrastructures, offering insights into the root causes of issues through advanced tools like machine learning and AIOps. This comprehensive approach enables organizations to anticipate and address potential problems before they impact users, enhancing the efficiency of DevOps and SRE teams by reducing mean-time-to-investigate (MTTI) and mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). Observability not only improves operational performance but also aids SEIM teams in protecting digital assets and informs digital marketing strategies by analyzing customer interactions. By integrating monitoring and observability, businesses can achieve a unified data platform that supports innovation and growth through resilient systems and superior digital experiences.

In the rapidly advancing field of technology, combining serverless architecture with AI offers new opportunities and challenges, and New Relic is advancing this integration by supporting AWS Lambda response streaming functions. This feature allows functions to deliver outputs progressively, enhancing real-time data flow crucial for AI applications that require instant insights and rapid data processing. The integration aims to reduce latency, processing times, and memory usage, improving AI application scenarios such as anomaly detection and real-time data classification. As a leader in observability, New Relic provides detailed insights and seamless integration to optimize serverless AI operations, offering features like real-time data tracking, error debugging, and response streaming metrics. These capabilities are designed to enhance user experience and inform strategic decisions, while New Relic emphasizes that the views expressed by their Senior Product Manager in this blog are personal and not comprehensive of their commercial offerings.

In the rapidly advancing field of technology, New Relic is focusing on enabling customers to exploit serverless architecture and AI by introducing support for AWS Lambda response streaming functions. This feature, integrated with AI monitoring, allows Lambda functions to deliver outputs progressively, which is advantageous for AI applications requiring real-time data processing and insights. This approach reduces latency and memory usage, enhancing functionalities such as anomaly detection and real-time data classification. New Relic offers comprehensive observability tools to monitor and optimize these serverless AI operations, providing metrics and insights to improve decision-making and streamline workflows. Senior Product Manager Jigar Panchmatia underscores the importance of these innovations in offering a seamless and interactive user experience, while also inviting users to engage with New Relic's community for further discussion and support.

IIS logs are critical for monitoring web server interactions, diagnosing issues, and enhancing website performance by providing detailed insights into user requests and server responses. Administrators can select log formats like IIS, W3C, or NCSA, with W3C offering customizable logging options. Locating IIS logs varies across platforms, with specific steps for finding them on different versions of IIS and Azure services. If logs are not found, it might be due to pre-IIS request handling or disabled logging. Techniques like Failed Request Tracing (FRT) and tools like New Relic’s log monitoring agent can aid in advanced error logging and analysis. Real-time insights from these logs help in identifying security threats, optimizing server performance, and streamlining data analysis, ultimately reducing downtime and improving customer satisfaction. Consolidating log analysis across distributed infrastructures with tools like New Relic can simplify management and provide a clear overview, enhancing website reliability and performance.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform developed by Google to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, emerging as the de facto standard for container orchestration. It operates across various environments, from cloud-based to traditional servers, and simplifies the complexities of managing thousands of container instances by creating an abstraction layer over a group of hosts. Key benefits of Kubernetes include improved resource utilization, cloud-agnostic deployment, and enhanced application management through automated load balancing, resource allocation, and service discovery. Despite its advantages, Kubernetes adoption faces challenges such as a complex technology landscape, alignment issues between development and business priorities, and the need for teams to acquire new skills. Best practices for optimizing Kubernetes infrastructure involve setting resource limits, implementing security measures like RBAC and secrets management, and employing monitoring and logging solutions. The platform's extensive ecosystem includes tools like Helm for application management and Istio for service mesh integration, further enhancing its capabilities.

IIS logs play a crucial role in providing visibility into web server interactions, aiding in diagnosing issues, monitoring performance, and enhancing website reliability by capturing details like event time, IP addresses, requested pages, and response times. Administrators can manage these logs using different formats such as IIS, W3C, or NCSA, and tools like IIS Manager allow them to configure logging settings and locate the logs across various platforms, including Azure. While analyzing these logs can be complex due to their distributed nature across multiple servers and platforms, tools like New Relic simplify the process by consolidating log data and offering real-time insights, helping organizations reduce downtime and improve customer satisfaction. Effective management includes setting logging parameters to control file size and location, using tools for automated log analysis, and employing advanced techniques like Failed Request Tracing for detailed error logging, ultimately optimizing web server performance and identifying potential security threats.

New Relic introduces Fleet Control and Agent Control as part of New Relic Control, offering a centralized and scalable solution for managing infrastructure-level instrumentation on Kubernetes clusters. These tools address common challenges in observability by ensuring that instrumentation is healthy, consistent, and up to date across multiple environments. Fleet Control allows for centralized management of Kubernetes infrastructure, reducing manual efforts by enabling bulk management and version upgrades of agents, while Agent Control provides remote supervision to maintain agent health and consistency. The public preview supports infrastructure instrumentation for Kubernetes clusters using various agents, and users can start managing fleets and configurations through a straightforward process involving the creation of deployments and configurations. These capabilities aim to streamline the instrumentation process, eliminate telemetry blind spots, and simplify the management of large-scale observability infrastructures.

Fleet Control and Agent Control are new capabilities introduced by New Relic to enhance observability in modern infrastructure, particularly focusing on managing instrumentation in Kubernetes clusters at an enterprise scale. These tools aim to reduce manual work, eliminate blind spots, and streamline the management of infrastructure instrumentation by providing a centralized, scalable interface for installation, monitoring, configuration, and updates. Fleet Control allows for bulk management of agents grouped by instrumentation needs, while Agent Control acts as a lightweight supervisor to ensure agents remain in sync with the desired state. This public preview supports infrastructure instrumentation for Kubernetes clusters and offers an intuitive UI for managing and monitoring agent health, making it easier to deploy configurations and upgrade agents en masse without the need for scripting.

RUM (Real User Monitoring) and APM (Application Performance Monitoring) are complementary tools that provide a comprehensive view of web applications from both the user's perspective and the service layer's perspective, forming part of an Intelligent Observability platform. RUM focuses on real-time user experience by monitoring metrics such as page load times, errors, and user engagement through browser-embedded data, offering insights that help optimize user interfaces and improve customer retention. APM, on the other hand, monitors the performance of software applications throughout their lifecycle, including metrics like latency and error rates, to ensure applications meet performance goals, enabling technical teams to identify and resolve issues proactively. Together, these tools provide full-stack observability, offering businesses detailed insights into both system operations and user experiences, which are critical for optimizing performance and enhancing business outcomes across various industries, from e-commerce to financial services and media delivery.

RUM (Real User Monitoring) and APM (Application Performance Monitoring) are integral components of an observability platform, providing comprehensive insights into web applications from both user experience and service performance perspectives. RUM captures real-time data on user interactions via embedded JavaScript in browsers, offering insights into page load times, errors, and user engagement, which helps businesses optimize customer experiences and drive better outcomes. Conversely, APM focuses on server-side performance, monitoring key metrics such as latency and error rates, allowing technical teams to manage application lifecycles, identify issues, and maintain optimal service delivery. Together, RUM and APM deliver full-stack observability by combining user activity insights with detailed system performance data, enabling businesses to optimize operations, enhance user satisfaction, and achieve their objectives efficiently. These tools are applicable across various industries, including e-commerce and financial services, and their combined use provides a holistic view of both infrastructure and user engagement, facilitating informed decision-making and improved business performance.

New Relic has achieved a perfect score of 100 in the 2025 Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, highlighting the company's commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace for LGBTQ+ employees through policies, equitable benefits, and an inclusive culture. This national benchmarking tool evaluates corporate policies across four key areas, and New Relic's initiatives, such as Employee Resource Groups, inclusive healthcare benefits, and professional growth programs, contributed to this recognition. The company's emphasis on employee-led initiatives and continuous innovation demonstrates its dedication to creating a supportive environment where all employees can thrive, reflecting the collective effort of its workforce.

New Relic proudly announced receiving a perfect score of 100 in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index for 2025, highlighting the company's dedication to creating an inclusive workplace for LGBTQ+ employees. This index evaluates corporate policies and practices across non-discrimination policies, equitable benefits access, inclusive culture, and corporate social responsibility. New Relic's initiatives include Employee Resource Groups like Rainbow Relics, inclusive healthcare benefits that cover gender-affirming care, professional development programs through their "Building a Better New Relic" series, and encouraging employee-led initiatives to shape workplace culture. This recognition underscores the collective efforts of New Relic's employees to foster a supportive environment and reflects the company's ongoing commitment to leveraging diversity and removing barriers to opportunity.

New Relic Control is an advanced observability control plane developed to centralize and automate the management of observability across complex infrastructure environments. It integrates Fleet Control, Agent Control, and Pipeline Control into a cohesive platform, allowing DevOps and Platform teams to efficiently deploy, configure, and optimize agents and telemetry data. Fleet Control offers centralized management of agent configurations across clusters, Agent Control ensures consistent infrastructure instrumentation, and Pipeline Control optimizes telemetry data ingest, reducing noise and cost. The platform addresses challenges such as fragmented tooling and inconsistent configurations by providing centralized visibility, proactive management, and intelligent automation, thus enhancing operational efficiency and reducing risk. As New Relic expands the capabilities of this platform, users are encouraged to explore its features through public previews and comprehensive documentation, with the promise of ongoing updates and enhancements.

New Relic Control is a comprehensive observability control plane designed to address the challenges of managing modern infrastructure environments by centralizing and automating the observability lifecycle. It integrates Fleet Control, Agent Control, and Pipeline Control into a unified platform, facilitating the deployment, configuration, and optimization of agents and telemetry data across various environments. Fleet Control automates the management of observability agents, enabling centralized configurations and streamlined deployments, while Agent Control supervises infrastructure instrumentation to ensure consistent and compliant setups. Pipeline Control optimizes telemetry data ingestion by filtering unnecessary data, thus reducing costs and enhancing clarity. This platform is part of New Relic's effort to simplify observability management at an enterprise scale, offering features such as centralized visibility, intelligent automation, and seamless extensibility for New Relic agents and OpenTelemetry integrations.