New Relic Instant Observability Cuts Security Stack Alert Times To Minutes

‘We want to be the place that’s the daily habit for engineers to figure out what’s going on in their software so that we can save them time and they can deliver better experiences,’ says Buddy Brewer, group vice president and general manager of product for New Relic.

New Relic recently launched Instant Observability that allows engineers to instrument, dashboard and alert their entire security stack in minutes through an open catalog of more than 400 “quickstarts.”

The launch features contributions from partners such as Cribl, Fastly, Gigamon, Kentik, Lacework and Trend Micro.

“Instant Observability is about solving that problem for our users and removing as much friction as we possibly can from that problem of just getting software instrumented in the first place,” Buddy Brewer, group vice president and general manager of product for San Francisco-based New Relic, told CRN. “It’s our new reimagined on-ramp to getting data into New Relic.”

New Relic recently commissioned a study where it surveyed 1,300 engineers and found that only 26 percent “felt like they had actually a mature observability practice in an environment where we’re all working from home,” Brewer said.

“A big challenge is even before you get to the analytics it’s actually getting your software instrumented in the first place,” he added. “For every piece of software that is observed by New Relic or by another company who does what we do, there’s far more software that’s just not being observed at all. It’s gotten to the point now where software architectures have become so complicated that developers can’t instrument fast enough to keep up with the pace of the software that they’re delivering and shipping.”

About one-third of those surveyed said they use six or more tools to figure out what’s going on their software, according to the study.

“What’s kind of unique about our ecosystem, specific to partners, is that oftentimes the partner integrations you find in these platforms are in a different part of the platform,” Brewer told CRN. “There’s the first-class integrations and then there’s the partner integrations, and we didn’t do that here. What we did is we have the partners in the same ecosystem as all of the integrations that our own engineers built.”

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“We share New Relic’s vision for an open ecosystem empowered by rich telemetry,” said Michael Dickman, chief product officer at Gigamon, a cloud visibility company in Santa Clara, Calif. “By providing 5,000-plus metadata attributes, customers enhance their full security stack to go deep into the application communications of VM, container and bare-metal workloads. New Relic quickstarts make it easy to visualize Gigamon flow and metadata, complementing log- and metric-based observability.”

Brewer said having to pivot back and forth between two tools under a moment of stress when trying to solve an outage is time- consuming and challenging.

Instant Observability also provides out-of-the-box alerts, according to Brewer. When users click on install and go through the install process, they get the data, the dashboards and alerts, he said, adding that previously that all had to be done manually.

“We want to be the place that’s the daily habit for engineers to figure out what’s going on in their software so that we can save them time and that they can deliver better experiences,” he told CRN. “Part of that involves expanding our platform to cover more use cases organically. We’ll never be the one single tool that people use for everything from plan to build to deliver to running, so for those other tools we want to connect all of those into our ecosystem so that they’re not dealing with that swivel chair problem of having to move back and forth between tools. If we can save engineers a little bit of time, it makes a huge difference in their day to day and that’s really what this is all about, saving people time.”

New Relic Thursday also unveiled its acquisition of CodeStream, a developer collaboration platform, and launched New Relic CodeStream. The offering connects application telemetry data directly to the relevant code inside the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This integration allows developers to instrument, collaborate and resolve issues faster.