Would anyone or anything or any entity be bold enough to call themselves (or itself) an ‘all-in-one’ observability platform? One company would… and it’s New Relic.
There’s always that thorny area with observability specialists where some in the industry still think of cloud-era observability firms as Application Performance Management (APM) specialists – ask Dynatrace, it would agree – and so New Relic will perhaps always be fighting against that tide i.e. it’s Wikipedia page and more fails to use the term.
So then, how is it working to substantiate its claim for this space?
The company used its appearance at AWS re:Invent 2022 to detail integration support for AWS Compute Optimizer, AWS Lambda Extensions and AWS App Runner.
“This integration will help engineers troubleshoot workflows, and optimize and analyze containerized applications faster, easier and more efficiently within our single all-in-one platform. With these new integrations, customers reduce tooling and engineering costs while increasing time to market through an expanded set of AWS cloud services as part of their overall full-stack observability strategy,” notes the company.
As organizations continue to migrate to the public cloud, enterprises of every size and industry are realizing that cloud-based observability platforms are powering their engineering teams.
Bottom line basics
So, again then, why is observability so impactful on a business’s bottom line?
According to Riya Shanmugam GVP of global alliances and channels and Ishan Mukherjee, SVP of marketing at New Relic, their firm’s platform now enables Ops teams to monitor, debug, and improve their entire stack.
With these new integrations, customers reduce tooling and engineering costs while increasing time to market through an expanded set of AWS products and services as part of their overall full-stack observability strategy.
“New Relic is thrilled to continue building upon our strategic partnership with AWS. By combining New Relic’s industry-leading observability platform with AWS, New Relic helps customers further de-risk and accelerate their cloud migration, modernization and workload optimization initiatives on the cloud,” said Shanmugam..
She says that her firm is ‘committed to pushing the leading edge of innovation with AWS’ and that it will do this by simplifying observability in cloud environments and supporting even bigger efficiency gains.
The new AWS product support includes:
AWS Compute Optimizer – New Relic allows customers to evaluate rightsizing recommendations, configure enhanced infrastructure metrics, and streamline migration to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances powered by AWS Graviton processors. New Relic helps customers understand the rightsizing effects on their applications and end-user experience, allowing quick feedback on cost-saving efforts.
AWS Lambda Extensions – In the past, AWS allowed third-party tools like New Relic to ingest AWS Lambda logs directly to reduce cloud spend, saving costs for New Relic customers. AWS has now extended this functionality to all telemetry data types, including metrics, events, and traces. The AWS Lambda telemetry application programming interface (API) makes it simpler for New Relic customers to receive telemetry about AWS Lambda function invocation, such as runtime, tags, max memory, and timeout, enabling in-context visibility and speeding up application development.
AWS App Runner – Customers can now use New Relic to monitor and optimize containerized applications, ensure they perform as expected and validate that the App Runner service was deployed correctly. New Relic also collects metrics, events, and logs for complete visibility into containerized applications, providing users with telemetry to increase uptime and reliability.
With a single full-stack observability platform, joint New Relic and AWS customers need only one place to monitor, debug, and improve their entire stack. The solution correlates the customer experience — including web and mobile, application and infrastructure performance and availability — with AWS products and services in one platform. New Relic continues to invest in supporting the AWS infrastructure that its customers depend on to achieve faster, lower-risk migrations with compelling business outcomes.
Who needs observability, anyway?
In terms of who needs observability and why, take a global support manager ground transportation company Gett.
Dani Konstantinovski has to run an architecture that contains above 200 microservices running on AWS. If something were to ever go wrong or his team were to experience an issue, the term would flag the incident as what it calls a ‘fire’, to use a piece of the company’s own in-house custom-tuned personalization terminology
“With New Relic capabilities we can identify the problem, understand exactly what services were affected, what’s the reason, and what we need to do to resolve it. New Relic gives us this observability – it helps us to provide better service for our customers,” said Konstantinovski.
The three new offerings are the latest in New Relic and AWS’s five-year strategic collaboration agreement, which has also featured New Relic for Startups on AWS Activate Console, New Relic for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) with AWS Fargate, and Pixie on Amazon EKS.
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.