New Relic today revealed it has acquired CodeStream as part of an effort to make observability data more accessible to developers.

Buddy Brewer, group vice president (GVP) and GM at New Relic said New Relic CodeStream makes application telemetry data collected via the New Relic One platform directly available within an integrated development environment (IDE), now including Microsoft VS Code. In addition, there are also integrations with Microsoft Teams and the GitHub repository.

The goal is to close an observability gap that exists today between developers and IT operations teams that stems from a lack of developer visibility into production environments, he noted.

Finally, New Relic is also announcing a core user pricing option for New Relic One that is aimed at developers. Starting at $49 per month, developers gain access to a core set of capabilities such as CodeStream integrations, errors inbox, logs, GraphQL application programming interfaces (APIs) and the ability to build and run custom applications on New Relic One.

Peter Pezaris, CodeStream co-founder and CEO, now GVP and GM, strategy and developer tools at New Relic, said becoming part of New Relic will make it easier to bridge the divide that exists between most developers and IT operations teams by making it much easier for developers to see how their code is actually executing in a production environment. That capability will eliminate scenarios where code that runs just fine on a laptop executes poorly in a production environment, he added.

Developers can also add inline code comments, trigger pull requests, request feedback and track issues directly from their IDE via integrations with a wide range of developer and communication tools. Developers also can switch from New Relic One into an IDE in a single click to navigate, triage and remediate production errors in the context of the code they wrote.

New Relic is initially making New Relic CodeStream available for free—no credit card required—during a preview period that extends to January 12, 2022. Afterward, some of the more advanced features will require a paid user license once free tier limits are reached. Similarly, IT teams can also sign up for a free New Relic One account without entering a credit card to instrument their applications.

As the responsibility for managing applications in production environments continues to shift left, Pezaris said it’s critical to give developers the tools they need to optimize code in a production environment.

It’s not quite clear exactly how much responsibility for applications is shifting left toward developers; it differs from one organization to the next. Many are simply trying to reduce as much friction as possible between developers and their IT operations teams by providing more ‘connective tissue’ from New Relic that IT teams would have to otherwise write themselves, noted Pezaris.

It may take some time to bridge the observability gap between developers and IT operations teams. Most IT operations teams are still coming to terms with what observability provides that existing IT monitoring tools don’t. Monitoring, at its core, focuses on predefined metrics to identify when a specific platform or application is performing within expectations. The metrics tracked generally focus on, for example, resource utilization. In contrast, observability combines metrics, logs and traces—a specialized form of logging—to instrument applications in a way that makes it simpler to troubleshot issues without having to rely solely on a limited set of metrics that have been pre-defined.

In theory, at least, that level of observability should ultimately reduce the total number of incidents an IT operations team needs to fix by identifying issues long before they become an actual disruption.