As we know, New Relic is a cloud-based company that focuses on performance and availability monitoring. Its technology proposition is founded in the use of a standardized Apdex (application performance index) score to set and rate application performance across a given computing environment in a unified manner.
According to New Relic’s 2022 Observability Forecast most organizations expect to have robust observability practices in place by 2025. Really?
Such goals are a) arguably pretty difficult to attain b) almost suggesting that many observability players could be out of business within the next 18 months if these goals are met and c) a moving target anyway, so very difficult to pin down and assess to any definitive degree with such asssuredness.
Regardless, New Relic is upbeat – well, it would be, it’s the ‘all-in-one observability platform for every engineer’ (or so it says on the company’s branded t-shirts, tea cosies and conference freebie giveaway lipgloss tubes) – and the organization want its new integration partners (Atlassian, AWS, CircleCI and Snyk are among the brands that have all joined up in recent times) to feel upbeat about what’s happening too.
Extra tools, services & chocolates
There’s a lot going on at New Relic and the company has now tabled extra tools, services & chocolates for everyone.
The company grew its technology partner ecosystem by over 25% to date in 2022 and now offers integrations with 500+ cloud services, open source tools and enterprise technologies. New quickstart contributions have been added to the catalogue from developer tools such as Atlassian, AWS, CircleCI, Confluent, Jenkins, JFrog and Snyk.
We added the chocolate bit to stay upbeat, but there’s probably more of that too.
The most commonly cited technologies driving the need for observability are security (49%), cloud-native application architectures (47%), multi-cloud migration (42%) and adoption of open source technologies (39%).
Multi-cloud observability
New Relic lasy year launched its Instant Observability ecosystem of integrations and pre-built observability resources. The company also expanded its commitment to multi-cloud observability with expanded partnerships and integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
“Today’s engineers are leveraging observability alongside best-of-breed tools to accelerate their customers’ most important business initiatives, including cloud adoption, application modernization and digital customer experience. We see the value in providing a vast ecosystem of partnerships and integrations that help engineers grow their observability practices alongside the tools and technologies they already know and love,” said New Relic SVP of strategy & experience Peter Pezaris.
New integrations include CI/CD and DevOps platforms that allow DevOps teams to gain visibility into the performance and health of their continuous integration and deployment pipelines, APIs and web application development workflows. Users can view New Relic observability data alongside their release pipelines to help users boost release velocity and quality.
Key integrations here include Atlassian Bitbucket, CircleCI, Jenkins and JFrog.
DevOps & vulnerability
There also updates related to DevSecOps and vulnerability management tools that allow every engineer to prioritize security risk at every stage of the software development lifecycle.
Now engineers can integrate third-party security tools with native vulnerability detection in New Relic for unified security in context. Key integrations include AWS Security Hub, GitHub, Lacework and Snyk.
According to Pezaris and team, “Prometheus, the de facto Kubernetes monitoring tool, makes it easier to understand the performance of Kubernetes clusters and cluster services. New Relic’s Prometheus agent and quickstarts allow engineers to analyze the performance of their Kubernetes clusters and cluster services using prebuilt dashboards and alerts to take advantage of effortless enterprise-grade Prometheus monitoring.”
Notable integrations for services that utilize the open-source Prometheus toolkit include: Calico, CockroachDB, CoreDNS, Etcd, NGINX, Redis and Traefik.
Overall look & feel
Overall then, there’s a lot happening in the (cloud) observability space that necessitates bonding and a fusion of new integrations between established (and smaller) platform and toolset providers – it’s all about increasing query speeds, but also making them more accurate while dealing with the spectre of outliers where they inevitably exist… and all while optimizing costs and proving ease of use through dashboards and automation(s) where possible.
That’s all way too long to fit into a slogan or under a logo, but it goes some way to describing how observability is attempting to edge towards agility today.
About Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.