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.
