At its FUTURESTACK 2019 event in New York today, New Relic announced it has extended the New Relic One Observability Platform to add support for its new Logs, Traces, Metrics and AI module offerings.

Ken Gavranovic, general manager and senior vice president of products for New Relic, said his company is committed to extending the breadth of a programmable platform to address DevOps requirements flexibly, rather than forcing IT teams to stitch together multiple tools to monitor their applications.

Step 1 of 7

14%

Which of the following best describes how you currently monitor and manage systems across your hybrid cloud environment?(Required)

Multiple separate tools for different environments

Multiple separate tools for different monitoring and management functions

Single consolidated dashboard

Custom built monitoring and management solution

No full monitoring and management solution

Don’t know

How valuable would it be for your monitoring and management solution to incorporate predictive analytics to help you identify and address system issues that are critical and not waste time or effort working through all the data and “noise” that is not critical?(Required)

Extremely valuable

Moderately valuable

Somewhat valuable

Slightly valuable

Not valuable

How do you most typically address potential system issues BEFORE they impact your operations?(Required)

Automated workflows and playbooks to remediate potential issues as soon as they are detected

An orchestrated response process that leverages automation, AI, and human expertise to rapidly respond to potential issues

Advanced monitoring tools such as predictive analytics and anomaly detection to proactively identify and address potential issues

Respond to issues as they arise, using manual processes and troubleshooting techniques

A combination of automated remediation, orchestrated response, and/or proactive monitoring to address potential system issues

Don’t know

Other

What methods does your organization use to control and monitor cloud/IT spending?(Required)

Centralized procurement processes

Pre-approved budget thresholds

Automated cost monitoring tools

Department-level spending controls

Regular cost audits and reviews

Cloud cost optimization platform

Approval workflows for resource provisioning

Native financial operations tools provided by the cloud provider

No formal controls in place

Don’t know

Other

Please specify:

Which methods do you rely on most to detect security vulnerabilities in your systems?(Required)

Automated scanning tools

Manual assessments

Vendor notifications

Threat modeling (for early detection)

None of these

Don’t know

Other

Please specify:

What are the TWO most common ways you prioritize vulnerabilities to address within your environment?(Required)

Based on potential impact

Based on exploitability

Regulatory compliance requirements

Based on CVSS scores

Risk-based analysis of multiple factors

First-in-first-out approach

No formal prioritization process

Don’t know

How do you typically handle system updates and security patches?(Required)

Automated updates and patches

Manually review and apply updates and patches on a regular schedule

A combination of automation and manual review

Apply updates and patches on an as-needed basis.

Outsourced update and patch management

No defined process

Don’t know

Other

Δ

As part of the effort, New Relic also is making it possible for customers to build applications using the data New Relic stores in its cloud platform using a framework based on React and GraphQL. The company is also making available a series of open source monitoring applications that organizations can customize in less than an hour using templates it provides.

New Relic also announced the availability of New Relic Logs, a log management service intended to make it easier for operations teams to correlate log data across application and infrastructure sources. The module will enable teams to run ad hoc searches that return queries in milliseconds without having to switch to another tool.

At the same time, New Relic announced the availability of New Relic Traces and New Relic Metrics, to help DevOps teams more easily identify dependencies across the IT environment. The goal is to make it possible for teams to understand all the upstream and downstream events occurring across a distributed IT environment using a single platform, said Gavranovic.

For example, DevOps teams will be able to monitor a serverless computing framework from within New Relic in addition to turning on a feature flagging tool that has been integrated via application programming interfaces (APIs).

Finally, New Relic AI, available in beta, will bring artificial intelligence (AI) to the platform in the form of machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics to correlate, aggregate and prioritize incident data automatically across multiple tools to reduce alert fatigue and improve mean time to resolution. New Relic AI is already integrated with PagerDuty, Slack and other tools to enable organizations to slipstream this capability into their existing workflows, said Gavranovic.

By taking that approach, organizations can embrace New Relic as an open platform by organizations regardless of their current level of IT maturity, he added.

New Relic is clearly betting a single integrated tool for monitoring the entire IT environment will be preferable to integrating a wide range of disparate tools. Gavranovic believes that approach will have even more appeal as organizations embrace microservices to build and deploy applications. Given all the dependencies that exist between all those microservices, monitoring tools will need to reach across applications and infrastructure to enable DevOps teams to discover and monitor all those dependencies in near real-time.

Naturally, New Relic is not the only provider of monitoring tools with similar ambitions. It is, however, a lot further along in terms of turning monitoring tools into an actual platform.

— Mike Vizard