Company-Wide Dashboards Enable Scalable Visibility

To build something great typically requires teams of people working together. In today’s enterprises, DevOps methodologies and the teams implementing them are becoming essential to the development of modern software. And a key component to DevOps success is access to the right data.

The mechanics of getting and sharing this data is a solved problem, though … right? Well, not quite. Many large New Relic customers use a multi-account model to manage departments, teams, and business units. That is, they have separate accounts for the mobile team and New Relic Mobile data, the backend team and New Relic APM data, and the operation teams and New Relic Infrastructure data.

This model works great for segmenting permissions and data within organizations, but it can also encourage data isolation by making it difficult to compare data points from one account to another. Inflexible account models and the inability to query across these accounts can make it difficult to build an end-to-end view of the performance of your services and teams in a single dashboard. This isolation can block your organization from building a true end-to-end understanding of your environment.

This is a nemesis worth taking down.

So today, to reduce data isolation and better support New Relic customers with multiple accounts, we’re excited to announce company-wide dashboards, which let customers combine data from different accounts into a single dashboard.

Company-wide dashboards let customer quickly build dashboards that combine data across a variety of teams and silos in their organization.

For example, a DevOps manager who owns numerous apps and services will be able to create single dashboards that combine data into one cohesive view, regardless of where that data lives in their New Relic account structure. Similarly, DevOps users will be able to see the upstream and downstream dependencies that impact a key service or app, enabling them to troubleshoot problems more effectively.

It’s important to note that the new feature does not require existing customers to change anything. The account structures they’ve built will remain exactly the same. Company-wide dashboards don’t change the visibility and access permissions that currently exist. If a user is not named on the account, they won’t be able to query the account, pin a chart to a dashboard within the account, or view the data if it’s on a shared dashboard. You can still leverage the multi-account model, keeping existing visibility and access in place while now getting the added benefit of seeing all your data across accounts when desired.

Let’s look at how to take advantage of this new power:

NRQL queries across accounts

In the NRQL input bar, for example, customer can now choose the account they want to query from (regardless of the account they are logged in to). The drop-down menu displays all accounts for which they are a named user. There is also a search bar that lets you quickly narrow down the list of accounts.

You can see in the top right of the image above that the global account is “Insights” and the NRQL query is for the “NewRelicAdministration” account. The source account will always be persistent on the chart, so the user always knows where the query is sourcing data from.

Pinning widgets across accounts and dashboards

Not only can you now run queries across accounts, but you can also pin widgets across accounts. Once a query has been run, you can choose to copy to an existing dashboard or to a new dashboard in an entirely different account! Also, when adding a chart widget to Insights from any other New Relic product, customers can choose the account and dashboard. The cross-account pinning modal looks and acts the same across all the New Relic products, as shown below:

Dashboards that house cross-account charts are also viewable in the New Relic Insights Mobile App, so customers can see dashboards across accounts while on the go.

Action menu

As an addition to the company-wide dashboards, we have implemented a new action menu that houses all of the major functions with which a customer can interact with a chart. Customers can hover over any chart widget, and the three dots to launch the action will appear in the upper right.

A view for everyone

Whether you’re on a support team responsible for a set of accounts and metrics, a DevOps engineer, or a VP of engineering who needs to be able roll up and report on the health of applications and services, company-wide dashboards are designed to be incredibly versatile.

We’re very excited to release company-wide dashboards and we can’t wait to hear your feedback. This release offers powerful new ways to view your data, and ultimately how you view what’s happening across your organization.

You can check out our documentation for more info, including demo videos (start with the one below):