New Relic Adds Infrastructure and Mobile App Tracking to Its Monitoring Service
With data moving through apps from public clouds to private clouds through containers with dynamic usage pinging the CPU usage from here to there, a potential downside is figuring out where to look when the system breaks or has issues that need to be addressed.
New Relic, an application monitoring software-as-a-service company has developed some new features to address these problems. Its new Infrastructure, Unified Dashboards, and Mobile Crash Analysis services, which will be part of its Digital Intelligence Platform, will be available to customers beginning Nov. 16, 2016, the week that the company’s FutureStack conference will be held in San Francisco.
Dynamic Baseline view
The containerized infrastructure creates thousands of dynamic instances that come and go in a random manner, said Bharath Gowda, senior director, product marketing at New Relic.
“IT ops managers need to answer questions: how is my app doing? Why is my app running slow? Why is it not working?” said Gowda. In today’s dynamic environment, error tracking and pulling metadata is enormously time-consuming.
The Digital Intelligence Platform’s solution takes a unique approach to these issues, said Gowda in an interview last week.
APM Correlation at a glance
The platform deploys agents into operating systems that look at how resources are being used across apps, processes, and services that are running with any combination of cloud instances, microservices, containers, or traditional servers. By collecting data on not just the apps but on the infrastructure upon which the app is running, visibility is now available throughout the full stack.
The collection of configuration data, the data that tells servers how things should be working, said Gowda, is a key new feature. In this dynamic and multi-level environment, when config files are changed the impacts can be felt in unexpected places. The Digital Intelligence Platform collects data about when config files have been changed, along with information on who changed them, allowing for quick troubleshooting. The platform gives complete visibility into real-time health metrics including CPU memory, as well as configuration files, he explained. It provides a comprehensive view for developers to understand how their infrastructure is doing along with the surrounding ecosystem.
It is also able to track packages, who logged in, how packages are running and any changes being made. The agents collect data and sends it to the New Relic cloud where it is feed into unified dashboards and alerts.
Tag-driven alerts take advantage of Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) tagging system, explained Gowda. AWS comes with tags which New Relic uses to set up alerts or dashboards. Op teams don’t have to change anything.
Baseline Alerting, released in this platform, also allows customers to use NRQL queries, the query language for New Relic Insights.
The Mobile Experience
In order for a developer to understand whether an app is working well or not, they have also to understand user experience, said Gowda. How does the app respond to a user event like a button or click? At what point does the customer abandon the process? And, of course, how is my underlying infrastructure doing?
The new Mobile platform, New Relic Mobile, New Relic Browser, New Relic Synthetics and Mobile Crash Analysis, collects data about all these different points, about end users, about infrastructure, about the application, giving operators and developers a full view into all levels of the app, regardless of where the apps are in the stack.
Event Tracking Made Easy
According to the company, the data collected gives context to mobile crashes, allowing teams to prioritize fixes and advanced filtering with out-of-the-box data attributes such as geography, device type, app version, and filename. Clicking on a crash chart automatically adds it to New Relic Insights so product leaders can evaluate the impact of mobile app crashes alongside other key metrics.
“IT operations teams are tasked with supporting more services that have short lifespans and dramatically increasing the number of code updates they push,” said Jim Gochee, chief product officer, New Relic in the press release. “New Relic Infrastructure gives modern operations teams unparalleled visibility of their dynamic infrastructure, eliminates silos, and brings teams together to quickly identify and resolve problem areas.“
New Relic is a sponsor of The New Stack.
