New Relic, which provides DevOps and application monitoring software, launched an extension to its platform called New Relic One that visualizes data and maps complex environments. The effort is part of New Relic CEO Lew Cirne's strategy to develop a unified DevOps platform.
The new features for New Relic One include monitoring for AWS Lambda, new dashboards, global search and cross-account service maps. In a nutshell, New Relic One unifies customer data across multiple accounts to highlight all of the services that are instrumented by DevOps teams for visibility. The company has built up some capabilities via the acquisitions of SignifAI[1] and Kubernetes specialist CoScale[2].
According to Cirne, the crux of New Relic One is treating everything that needs to be instrumented as a entity. By defining entities, New Relic can map relationships and dependencies. An entity could be a mobile app, microservice, Kubernetes cluster[3] or Lambda Function on AWS[4]. "An entity is anything that you want to instrument that generates data, metrics and logs and doesn't run in isolation," explained Cirne. "It is pan enterprise scale."
Enterprises can have millions of entities with multiple instances, tools and teams working on them. In other words, the relationships can get complicated and hard to observe due to data silos and multiple applications and services. What used to be a dozen services that were independent are now hundreds due to fragmentation, containers and multi-cloud[5].
To Cirne, this entity approach makes it easier to determine co-dependencies in various enterprise environments that include cloud, hybrid and other services. Stitching together various systems can make companies more agile and faster to develop, but there are more co-dependencies.