New Relic: Instrumentation and Monitoring from Development to Production.

Efficiency: That’s the goal. One unified instrumentation and software analytics platform deployed across all non-production and production environments.

New Relic enables team collaboration across every phase of an application's lifecycle.

We engineers seem to like lists sooooo here we go!

1. CI/CD Pipeline - Custom Dashboard to Measures Success

Create a custom New Relic Insights Dashboard to builds, deployments, bugs, defects, etc. One central dashboard to analyze your code’s deployment pipeline and evaluate each deployment’s success rate.

    2. Custom Instrumentation - Whitebox all Business Critical Code

A line of instrumentation with New Relic is less expensive than verbose logging.

By default, New Relic APM captures and measure all web transactions. Transaction traces are provided for deep dive code level analysis. Where needed or required, developers can add New Relic custom instrumentation. When using an external XML file as a descriptor, this file can be deployed along with the New Relic agents. This bundled process keeps the continuity of deeper dive code-level instrumentation across all environments.

   3. Deployment Markers for Easy Impact Analysis

As builds are deployed to each environment, tagging each release with a deployment marker  in turn enables engineers to immediately see the impact and relevant KPI’s in a clear visual comparison graph.

   4. Collaborative Error Analytics and Error Profiling

QA and development can collectively utilize New Relic for Error Analytics and Error profiling. When a bug/issue is encountered, QA simply sends the link of the error details directly from New Relic to development. This process Reduces the redundancy in reproducing specific issues/bugs with the unique test data.

   5. Distributed Tracing

Use Distributed Tracing feature to identify where the time is being spent and exactly where the errors are originating from as the transaction traverses throughout each application/microservice.  Easier isolation and root cause analysis in distributed environments.

     6. Production Issue Triaging - Custom Attributes

Instrument custom attributes in both browser and APM to collect key information such as user ID's, or any attribute which is helpful for triaging. Also, a win for production, instrumenting all critical code basically "white boxes" the transactions, end to end, and eliminates the need for thread profiling/thread dumps.

     7. Reduce Mean Time to Resolution

Where oh where is the time being spent? Is it front end? Is it the backend? Which transactions? Is it the code? Is it the query? Is it the servers? Is it the… New Relic is one stop shop place to see and isolate the root cause. A unified end to end view.

     8. Proactive Alerting

Each situation or issue encountered in Production can become a proactive alert with thresholds (warning, critical) so that no one gets caught by surprise by the same situation again.

Summary!

Every team can use New Relic to make their jobs easier and more efficient. The overall goal is collaboration and transparency. This is why New Relic users become champions.

Rebecca Clinard