New Relic this week at its Future Stack 2017 conference extended the reach of its monitoring services via the release of a software development kit (SDK) that makes it possible for IT teams to monitor custom applications.
In addition, New Relic unveiled Health Map, which makes it much easier for IT administrators to correlate data collected from New Relic application and infrastructure monitoring services. Todd Etchieson, vice president of product management for New Relic, says developing Health Map was a natural next step after the expansion of its services into the realm of infrastructure monitoring. That capability should significantly reduce the finger-pointing that often occurs between developers and IT operations teams anytime there’s an application performance issue, says Etchieson.
New Relic is also adding billing and cost management features that enable customers to monitor costs in real time as well as plan for future Amazon Web Services (AWS) resource requirements. Rather than having to invoke a separate tool, users can leverage New Relic’s extensive history of relying on AWS to host its tools.
Application performance management (APM) tools from New Relic first gained prominence among developers who preferred to monitor their applications using a service. Because New Relic is deployed on AWS it’s especially well-suited to monitoring applications deployed on AWS. The company this week also announced that its monitoring tools now come with 20 pre-built integrations to AWS services including Amazon Kinesis Firehose, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Route 53, Amazon EC2 Container Service and Amazon EC2 Container Registry.
Now Etchieson says New Relic is expanding its reach in the enterprise as organizations embrace a more integrated approach to DevOps. In fact, he notes half of its customers are already consuming multiple services. Driving that adoption is a need to roll out more applications, many of which are based on microservices enabled by containers. This fact is forcing organizations to confront their DevOps issues because of the dynamic and ephemeral nature of containers. New Relic added support for container monitoring back in 2015.
Etchieson says New Relic doesn’t necessarily care where IT organizations choose to deploy their applications. Because New Relic made its APM software available as a service, use of APM expanded considerably. The company currently has 1,700 enterprise customers, he says.
Not all those customers are very far down the DevOps path, but more than a few organizations have begun their DevOps starting with an APM tool. In fact, in many organizations DevOps is a bottom-up transformation that begins with developers seeking more information about how their applications are performing.
As DevOps continues to evolve, the divide between application and infrastructure performance monitoring tools will continue to narrow. There may be different roles inside an IT organization that require different views to address specific issues. But at its core DevOps is all about providing cross-functional IT organizations with the context needed to resolve issues faster. In almost every case, that will require correlating data across both the application and infrastructure stack.