Category: New Relic

How New Relic Transforms Your Approach to Observability: From Reactive to Proactive to Predictive

Businesses are facing increasing pressure to deliver seamless, high-performance user experiences. Whether you’re managing a complex cloud infrastructure, mobile apps, or a distributed microservices environment, staying ahead of performance and system stability issues is crucial. New Relic helps you transition from reactive to proactive, even predictive observability, empowering teams to anticipate and resolve issues before they impact customers, ultimately driving operational efficiency and a superior user experience.

Data, Data and more Data

Data is the lifeblood of observability. The New Relic platform collects and houses data in the form of metrics, events, logs and traces, and surfaces this as information in views curated to specific domains including real users monitoring, application monitoring and more. Referred to as ‘MELT’, this data underpins all insights provided by New Relic.

  • Metric – A numeric measurement of an application or system. Metrics are typically reported on a regular schedule and examples may include a count of events over one minute’s time, a rate of some event per minute, or a numeric status at a moment in time, such as CPU% used.
  • Events – Can be thought of as simply “things that occur in a system”. For example, a server setting being changed would be an event. Another example: a website user clicking a mouse.
  • Logs – A message emitted by a system used to aid in understanding the activity of the system and to diagnose problems. New Relic embellishes logs with specific tags to link the log to the source application. This is known as logs-in-context and enables raw logs to be linked to the other forms of data New Relic collects. This context-rich enrichment helps your team to troubleshoot faster and pinpoint an issue’s origin.
  • Traces – Traces take multiple forms. Tracing encompasses stack traces on errors in applications to give developers insights into issues with their code, to comprehensive distributed tracing that provides end-to-end visibility of requests propagated through complex, distributed environments.

Real-Time Insights at Your Fingertips

Traditionally, teams often operated in a reactive mode, responding to performance issues after they occurred. This ‘firefighting’ has engineers scrambling to troubleshoot problems in production, as customers experience slow response times and possibly even outages. With its comprehensive real-time observability, this reactivity is a thing of the past, as New Relic provides immediate visibility into your system’s health: from frontend applications to backend servers, and mobile applications to cloud services. Accordingly, teams are able to detect issues as they arise, whether it’s slow load times, errors, or service degradation, and take the appropriate action to resolve the issue.

Out of the box, New Relic’s intuitive interface provides a range of perspectives, providing a view of interactions on mobile devices, to stack traces on errors in applications or the performance of your cloud services, drawing on metrics, events, logs and traces collected and housed in the New Relic platform. Extending the standard user interface, New Relic’s dashboard feature enables customised views of this same data, providing users the capability to assemble a perspective that addresses any unique needs they may have. With access to an industry-leading platform that can be further customised to requirements, your New Relic users can focus on proactive issue resolution rather than scrambling to discover why a problem has occurred.

Moving to Proactive: Anticipating Issues Before They Impact Users

Exceptional views of information are but part of the solution. New Relic’s alerting system surfaces issues proactively, notifying you in the channel of your choice, be it email, Slack, Microsoft Teams or otherwise. Businesses can specify static thresholds, have New Relic establish baselines of expected behaviour and utilise machine learning capabilities to receive timely notifications, enabling teams to act on potential issues before they become serious. With New Relic performing anomaly and automated problem detection, your team can act to head off concerns before they manifest into costly, reputation-damaging incidents. The end result is digital systems operating in an optimal state, providing value to you and your customers.

Predictions and Recommendations

Throughout the New Relic platform, machine learning and artificial intelligence is at work for you. Complementing your own staff’s intuition, the New Relic platform provides data-driven analysis specific to your requirements. This capability is built atop a knowledge base accumulated over 16 years of operation as an enterprise SAAS platform – no other platform can boast such a wealth of information. The end result is your entire digital estate is supported by you, combined with industry-leading machine learning models that evolve and facilitate recommendations as your environment changes. With New Relic’s predictive capabilities to analyse historical trends, teams can plan for scaling needs and ensure that the infrastructure is prepared for expected spikes in demand – all before problems occur.

What does this translate to for your business? There’s the proactive vs reactive thread we’ve stressed here, but the actual business outcomes?

  • Release new products without issue – enter new markets with confidence.
  • Provide a best-in-class user experience – your customers’ experience becomes the envy of your competitors, translating to a sustained revenue stream.
  • Maximise your human capital, and reap the benefits – supercharge your smartest people with the smartest tool.

There’s so much more to be realised, but these three alone are significant – take a moment to ruminate.

End-to-End Observability: A Unified Approach to Observability

From Mobile applications used by millions of users, to a Kubernetes cluster serving hundreds of microservices, New Relic provides end-to-end observability across the full digital spectrum of your organisation. One of the most powerful features of New Relic is its end-to-end observability capabilities. Whether you’re managing cloud environments, serverless applications, or distributed microservices, New Relic integrates seamlessly with all parts of your system. No matter where an issue occurs – be it in your user-facing application, microservices, or infrastructure – you can track and correlate all the data from the one unified platform.

Imagine being able to look at classic performance metrics, such as the Golden Signals popularised by Google, and then being able to view the underlying logs for that application with ease. This is known as logs in context in New Relic, and is but one example of how different data types – metrics and logs – are intelligently linked, providing the user with a best-in-class view of the operations of an application.

By correlating metrics, events, logs and traces, your organisation gets a full-picture view of performance in real-time and over time. As a result, teams are able to quickly surface issues and optimise performance, giving you confidence that your users will have a flawless experience no matter what part of your system they interact with.

Conclusion

New Relic is a platform that takes your team from reactive firefighting to proactive management, and ultimately, monitoring powered by machine learning and AI. By offering end-to-end observability, real-time alerts and anomaly detection and more, New Relic equips businesses with the insights needed to not just solve problems, but anticipate them before they impact users. With New Relic, you gain the power to optimise system performance, prevent outages and more, ensuring your customers’ experience remains a trouble-free one. Whether you’re responding to an issue, preparing for future demands, or predicting future trends: the future of observability is here, and it’s proactive, predictive, and powered by New Relic.

Anatomy of a New Relic FSO Dashboard

Full stack observability (FSO) is of paramount importance in today’s digital landscape due to the complexity of applications and infrastructure.  Modern business systems can involve distributed architectures, microservices, and containers, necessitating a holistic view to properly understand how all components interact.  The rise of cloud-native environments and DevOps practices also underscores the need for full stack observability to support resource optimisation, collaboration, and continuous delivery.

The New Relic FSO Dashboard offers a powerful and customisable platform that empowers developers and operations teams with real-time insights and comprehensive data visualisation.

So what does the New Relic FSO dashboard actually look like?

The ‘Business Overview’ dashboard displays important business metrics such as Average Order values By Day, Purchase Volume, Revenue Trend, Sales Funnel, and Abandoned Cart Rate.

In the second tab, the IT Platform Overview dashboard provides detailed information about application and infrastructure performance and status, including availability, daily site visitors, slow pages, most-used features, and mobile device types accessing the platform. This allows for quick identification of issues and prompt corrective actions.

The third tab, Cloud Migration Dashboard, helps track the progress of the migration journey and provides insights into how the cloud environment is being executed. The Percent of On-premises Hosts vs AWS Hosts, Average CPU Usage by AWS vs On-premises Host Location, Total Number of Hosts by Application, and Average Response Time by Host Location are displayed to show the before and after application/host response times, allowing you to determine the extent of improvement in response time after migration. This dashboard enables developers and IT operations teams to monitor the progress of migration in real time.

The User Metrics Dashboard provides an overall view of user behaviour to optimise applications and enhance user experience. It includes metrics such as visitor count, app usage, page visits, average response time, page loading time, and visitor countries/cities.

The Data Analytics Dashboard helps track database performance, identify and resolve performance issues, and the Application Metrics Dashboard provides real-time information on application performance, including response time, error rate, and throughput, allowing for proactive optimisation.

Additionally, there is a dashboard that helps manage AWS costs. Many companies experience difficulties in cost management when migrating to the cloud. In the AWS Budget Overview dashboard, you can examine the total cost divided into actual costs, forecasted costs, and limits. You can also view important metrics such as Pre-production Budget, Total Cost Trends, Budget Trending, and Estimated changes per service. This allows you to track cloud costs in real time and quickly identify areas that require cost optimisation. Furthermore, it provides valuable assistance in planning future budgeting related to the cloud environment.

As a trusted, Gold partner of New Relic, JDS has a team of experts who can not only implement the New Relic FSO dashboard, but also elevate your dashboard experience, take it to the next level, and unleash its full potential.  From designing visually appealing layouts, to fine-tuning performance metrics and alerts, JDS can maximise the value of New Relic’s powerful observability platform. Your applications and users will thank you for it!

The Power of FSO with New Relic

In the sophisticated landscape of today’s IT environments, the journey from telemetry data to business information demonstrates the complexity involved in achieving full-stack observability. Businesses in the throes of digital transformation have found the intricacy of their IT infrastructure compounding. Incorporating modern technologies such as cloud-based systems, microservices, containers, and serverless architectures, along with DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, is changing the shape of our technological future.

Observability surpasses traditional monitoring by providing a more comprehensive understanding of ‘why and how‘ an issue occurred. This holistic approach integrates telemetry data—logs, events, metrics, and traces—and presents it on a unified dashboard, unveiling hidden issues and promoting a profound understanding of their root causes. The concept of “observability” offers a departure from traditional IT performance management, providing a comprehensive view of system performance. By combining telemetry data into a unified dashboard, observability allows for an all-inclusive approach to managing cost, resource allocation, and customer experience, addressing the challenges of fragmented data management.

Why is “observability” gaining momentum?

Statistics indicate a significant shift towards multi-cloud usage. This, along with the growing expectation for superior digital experiences, has put enormous strain on IT teams. The challenge lies in delivering innovative features and services at breakneck speeds, while ensuring the seamless operation of existing systems.

JDS sees a lot of over-provisioned cloud-based platforms, as was typical with on-premise configurations. Historically, the main driver for over-provisioning was to cater for spikes, however modern cloud platforms can handle variations in load a lot more effectively. The trick to optimising cloud platforms is to measure and monitor usage. New Relic is a highly efficient tool to help you get the most from your cloud investment.

Conventional IT performance management strategies have hit their peak, instigating the transition towards “observability”. In New Relic’s 2022 Observability Forecast Report, 75% of the 1,614 global respondents confirmed their top-level management’s endorsement of observability technologies. Furthermore, a robust 78% consider observability to be crucial in realising significant business objectives.

One major factor driving the observability market is the availability of new standards and technologies like Open Telemetry (Otel) and extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). Even with the increase in funding and new technology, data growth is still the main driver behind the explosion of the observability market in recent years. Data is expected to grow at a 35% CAGR through 2025​​.

The New Relic FSO platform offers observability solutions that harness the power of cloud and AI technologies, providing comprehensive functionalities such as telemetry data collection, analysis, visualisation, anomaly detection, and alerts. For those inclined towards open-source observability tools, options such as Prometheus, Grafana, Zabbix, and Jaeger are available.

Why is full-stack observability so important?

Observability isn’t just pivotal for developers, engineers, and IT teams; it’s also crucial for improving customer experience. Real-time monitoring and issue detection are vital for businesses to prevent downtime and ensure optimal performance, avoiding negative impacts on revenue and customer sentiment.

Data-driven decision-making becomes feasible through the vast amount of insight delivered from full stack observability. Organisations can analyse performance metrics, error rates and user behaviour patterns to make informed decisions that improve their products, services, and infrastructure. Additionally, full stack observability can play a crucial role in security monitoring and compliance adherence, with the ability to detect threats and vulnerabilities while meeting regulatory requirements.  

In conclusion, as the digital panorama continues to evolve, the concept of observability has emerged as a key tool in the arsenal of modern businesses. By bridging the technological chasm, it enables a unified, bird’s-eye view of telemetry and business data across disparate teams, thereby amplifying operational efficiency and enriching the digital user experience. 
As we tread deeper into the realm of artificial intelligence, the significance of AI-powered operations (AIOps) is becoming increasingly apparent. This surge in importance is exemplified by the proliferation of observability services now facilitating AIOps environments. Overall, full stack observability empowers businesses to deliver reliable services, remain agile, and drive competitiveness in the dynamic digital realm.

JDS and the GO Foundation

The Go Foundation is an inspiring organisation empowering young Indigenous Australians by providing scholarships from primary school through to University.

Co-founded by Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin in 2009, the foundation offers mentoring, leadership, networks and support to GO students on their journey to employment.

JDS is immensely proud to have committed to donating $30k to the GO Foundation over the next three years.

It is an organisation that really resonates, as we recognise the vital importance of ensuring that all Australians have equal opportunity to participate socially, culturally and economically.

Extensive research has revealed that the completion of further education by Indigenous Australians can lead to increased earning capacity, greater employment opportunities, improved health and wellbeing outcomes, and reduced interaction with the justice system. The benefits that can come from Indigenous Australians going further beyond high school with their education can stretch beyond improving and enriching the lives of Indigenous communities – they can benefit everyone.

Positive enabling factors that are likely to increase Indigenous participation in further education include enhancing the quality of school experience for Indigenous students to ensure that culture is recognised, and the aspirations of each student is developed. Additionally, providing access to career advice and guidance, and information on the various choices and pathways available for Indigenous students is linked to increasing the quality of the school experience for Indigenous Australians.

The GO Foundation’s scholarship program provides financial assistance, tools and resources for Indigenous students to ensure their journey through school is rich and rewarding, and a broad range of career options, work experience and paid internships ensures the assistance continues well after the scholarship has ended.    

We hope that by dedicating our long-term support, we are contributing to generational change and opportunities for many students for many years to come.