Because apps, after all, sit on infrastructure. And New Relic monitors across the breadth.
There’s an interesting thing happening in the IT monitoring space that is a reflection on broader trends happening in enterprise IT.
Whereas in the past there was a fairly distinct line between application monitoring and infrastructure monitoring, that line is rapidly reducing. And the former application monitoring vendors are moving into the infrastructure space, while vendors that were focused on monitoring the status of servers and the like are increasingly giving the application side of the house more attention.
+ Also on Network World: New Relic aims to be your dashboard of the future +
The trend is, of course, a direct response to the DevOps movement—the idea that developers and operations teams need to work more closely (or, at the ultimate level, be essentially the same people). DevOps as an approach enables organizations to move faster, reduce their deployment times, innovate and reduce the risks involved in experimentation.
So, with all of these macro trends going on, it is interesting to see New Relic, the Silicon Valley monitoring darling, announce the general availability of its infrastructure monitoring product. Available Nov. 16, timed to coincide with the company’s FutureStack conference, New Relic Infrastructure is another component of the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform, a broadly unified monitoring platform that also throws a dose of analytics into the mix.
As New Relic points out in announcing this product, modern IT infrastructure is now very dynamic and software teams are constantly changing it and deploying on top of it.
These aren’t just glib words, however. New Relic founder and CEO Lew Cirne is well known for taking coding breaks where he gets away from the day-to-day business of running his business to get “down and dirty” with the code base New Relic is built upon. It’s fair to say Cirne is intimately aware of the issues around release cycles and their impact on innovation. (And yes, New Relic is an anagram of his name, a naming approach that in this case, is less about narcissism and more about fun.)
Anyway, according to the company’s materials, New Relic Infrastructure helps operations teams handle these challenges and have greater control of these environments to do the following:
- Move fast and deploy with confidence by correlating configuration changes with health metrics in real time. Powerful infrastructure-wide search across every host enables your team to find inconsistent configurations to detect and resolve issues quickly.
- Scale and adapt to diverse environments with any combination of cloud instances, microservices, containers or traditional servers. Tag-driven dashboards and alerts scale with your dynamic infrastructure, reducing administrative overhead.
- Gain full-stack visibility with the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform—a unified view from your infrastructure to application code performance to customer experience in one seamless context. Correlate host health with your application metrics from New Relic APM and understand how your infrastructure performance impacts business metrics through New Relic Insights.
Two editions with flexible cloud pricing
Moving to the all-important pricing on the new platform: the two offerings—New Relic Infrastructure Essentials and Professional—are available under the company’s cloud pricing model, which is calculated based on the size, number and total time running of customer instances.
Both editions ship with native support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Docker containers. Infrastructure Professional offers longer-term data retention and expanded monitoring functionality for popular Amazon Web Services, including CloudFront, DynamoDB, EBS, Elasticache, Elastic Load Balancing, IAM, Kinesis, RDS, SNS, SQS and VPC. Additional integrations will be available natively within New Relic Professional on an ongoing basis.
My POV
DevOps, beyond all the hype and vendor bluster, is absolutely a thing. This trend toward monitoring companies providing broader offerings across applications and infrastructure is one that has been in existence for a couple of years and shows no sign of abating. New Relic is a well-respected vendor in the space, and its offering looks solid.
