AWS Elemental has emerged as a critical player in the streaming media industry, providing a suite of tools essential for the delivery of rich media content. Its importance lies in its ability to handle complex tasks such as encoding, transcoding, packaging, and delivering video content at scale. These operations are crucial for streaming platforms that require high-quality, low-latency delivery to a diverse, global audience.

The challenge of monitoring AWS Elemental

Despite its robust capabilities, AWS Elemental presents unique monitoring challenges. Traditional tools like AWS CloudWatch offer basic monitoring functionality but lack the depth required for end-to-end observability in complex media architectures. This limitation leads to challenges in achieving full observability, which is crucial for maintaining uninterrupted service and high-quality user experiences. The inability to monitor these systems effectively can lead to increased mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR), affecting service reliability and revenue.

New Relic: A comprehensive monitoring solution

New Relic integration with AWS Elemental addresses monitoring challenges head-on by providing an observability platform that goes beyond traditional monitoring methods. This all-in-one platform is designed to offer real-time insights into the complex workflows of AWS Elemental, including:

  • Real-time performance tracking: New Relic enables media companies to track the performance of their streaming services in real-time. This capability allows for the immediate detection and diagnosis of any issues that may arise, significantly reducing the time to resolution.
  • Proactive issue detection: With advanced analytics and alerting features, New Relic helps in proactive issue detection. This early detection is crucial in preventing major disruptions and ensuring that streaming services run smoothly.
  • Optimization opportunities: Beyond monitoring, New Relic provides valuable data that can be used to optimize various aspects of streaming services. This includes streamlining workflows, improving resource allocation, and enhancing content delivery networks (CDNs) performance.

Key benefits of New Relic integration with AWS Elemental

New Relic integrates with AWS Elemental to provide improved observability, quicker issue resolution, and an enhanced viewer experience—and it’s cost-efficient: 

  • Improved observability: The New Relic observability platform offers a granular view of the streaming media architecture. This detailed perspective allows operation teams to monitor every aspect of the video workflow, ensuring that any issues can be identified and addressed promptly.
  • Quicker issue resolution with New Relic alerts: A critical aspect of New Relic integration with AWS Elemental is its enhanced alert capabilities. New Relic alerts provide a robust and flexible system for identifying and addressing issues rapidly. This system allows teams to set up tailored alerts for specific metrics or anomalies within their AWS Elemental workloads. These alerts can be configured based on a variety of conditions, ensuring that the operations team is notified immediately when potential issues arise. The flexibility of the alerting system means that alerts can be fine-tuned to reduce noise, ensuring that teams focus on the most critical issues. With these capabilities, the New Relic platform not only identifies issues more quickly than traditional monitoring tools but also ensures that the right people are alerted in real-time, enabling faster diagnosis and resolution. This reduction in response time is crucial for maintaining uninterrupted, high-quality streaming services and enhancing overall user satisfaction.
  • Enhanced viewer experience: Ultimately, the integration of New Relic with AWS Elemental enhances the overall viewer experience. By ensuring high-quality, uninterrupted streaming, media companies can maintain and grow their viewer base, directly impacting their success in the competitive digital media market.
  • Cost efficiency: By providing detailed insights into AWS usage, New Relic helps media companies optimize their spending on AWS services. This cost efficiency is achieved without compromising the quality or reliability of the streaming service.

Conclusion

In an industry where quality and reliability are non-negotiable, the integration of New Relic with AWS Elemental offers a significant advantage. By embracing this powerful monitoring solution, media companies can achieve enhanced performance, reduce costs, and provide a superior viewer experience.