New Relic One: The first programmable observability platform

Today at New Relic, we stand at an inflection point. Several years ago, a developer named Mark Story tweeted that New Relic is "magic pony amazing sauce." I’m not exactly sure what that is, but I know I want some! Since that tweet was published, we’ve continued to build amazing software that helps developers and operations teams meet the daily challenges they encounter.

But let’s acknowledge some truths about where we stand today:

Truth #1: The expectations and demands on modern software teams are higher than ever before. We know the pressure is on you to deliver new code as rapidly as possible. You’ve got to meet your SLOs with zero errors, and your code had better deliver business value with sub-zero response time. And your environments are only getting more complex. You have less time to react. Less time to troubleshoot. And less time to research every possible solution.

Truth #2: If you want to win in today's environment, you must play offense with software. You need to make decisions faster and use your business data in ways that give you a distinct competitive advantage.

Truth #3: Dashboards are great—they’re flexible and powerful tools we use every day. They’re fundamental to any observability platform and critical to how we get our job done. But if you’re going to play offense, you’ve got to move beyond the dashboard.

Bringing the power of programmability to New Relic One

Knowing this, we’ve embarked on a bold course to disrupt the industry and fully enhance the value we deliver to our users. We’ve set out on a very specific mission: to enable our customers to win with software.

And to do this we’ve made the New Relic One platform programmable.

Today, we’re giving you the same tools our own engineers use, so you can build applications—custom user interfaces deployed in New Relic One—that connect your observability data, gathered from myriad sources—including third-party open-source data—all in one place. And we’ve made it so easy that a developer can have an application up and running in an hour. We’ve even built a set of open-source applications you can deploy and use immediately!

The New Relic One platform massively accelerates your ability to move applications from idea to production in as little time as possible. Recently, for example, our General Manager for New Relic Browser, Buddy Brewer, envisioned a simple way to visualize customer experience and satisfaction scores. He sent the following sketch to a field engineer:

Two days later, Buddy had a production-ready application that showed not just what the customer experience scores were, but what they should be.

This New Relic One application is called the browser analyzer—it’s open source and available for you to use today.

Build on New Relic One

First things first: Programmability is additive to the New Relic platform. We’re not changing anything about the New Relic you use every day. You still get all that “magic pony amazing sauce”: automatic discovery and instrumentation of services, and curated views that help you find and fix issues fast, all on an intelligent platform that automatically connects your data and alerts you to anomalies in real time.

Connecting observability data to business outcomes is a critical step you must take to become a mature digital business. So, we’re simply giving you more power on our platform to help you take this step.

For example, consider a retailer that tracks its business and customer experience by store location. The retailer measures the success of each location using the same set of technical data, customer experience data, and business data, all tied to unique business KPIs the retailer sets for each store, as well as for the enterprise as a whole. Using a custom application built on top of New Relic One, the retailer’s decision-makers can view all locations from a single map and zoom in to analyze performance data from each location. With a single custom application, the retailer gathers the data it needs to better deliver on those critical business KPIs.

A custom application for tracking retail store performance built on the New Relic One platform.

The basics of the programmable platform

New Relic One applications are simply React components. We have integrated our APIs, New Relic Query Language (NRQL), and GraphQL to define a programming model that gives you access to all your New Relic data. You’ll be able to:

• Build React applications that reside in New Relic One and feature customized data visualizations and interactive interfaces.
• Use our library of React components and example applications to construct your own modular New Relic One applications.
• Build your applications to record and visualize data from any source, whether it’s New Relic-reported data or data pulled from third-party services or databases.

You’ll get an SDK, CLI, and APIs that have been designed to speed the time for building and deploying applications on top of New Relic One—all with no additional software to run or operate.

We’ve created all these resources to help you get started:

• New Relic Developers: Details about New Relic One application build tools:
  • The CLI, which helps you generate component templates, and publish and deploy applications
  • The client-side SDK, which gives you:
    • React JS components for designing visual and interactive elements
    • APIs for using New Relic One platform capabilities
• GitHub
  • Example open-source applications (see below)
  • Hands-on workshop
• New Relic Explorers Hub: Tools and training to help you build your own applications from scratch

Download and deploy New Relic One applications today!

We’ve also open sourced a number of applications that you can fork from GitHub for use in your production environment. Here’s a closer look at a few more of our favorites:

The datalyzer

The datalyzer lets you explore, slice, and dice event and metric data in a simple, fast, and intuitive way. The datalyzer integrates directly into New Relic One's entity explorer so you can jump in from any entity (you can also access it as a standalone launcher).

Check out the datalyzer application repo in GitHub.

Cloud optimize

Is your team wasting money on excess cloud capacity? This application compares the size of your resources to their utilization, and figures out where you're spending more than you need to. (Currently supports Amazon Web Services.)

Check out the Cloud optimize application repo in GitHub.

Network telemetry

The network telemetry visualizes data collected through the Network Telemetry Integration.

Check out the network telemetry application repo in GitHub.

Get started building New Relic One applications

When we started on this journey of programmability, our CEO and founder, Lew Cirne, challenged us to radically shift the way we deliver solutions to customers on our platform. The ability to create more perfect software doesn’t come from a “bag of metrics”—it comes from entity-centric context creation, rapid innovation, and the delivery of amazing customer experiences. To do that, we’ve given our customers the first observability platform that they can build on.

New Relic One—and the power to build applications—is available today to all New Relic customers with a Pro subscription or to those engaged in a free trial. When you’re ready to get started, visit New Relic One—where if you can imagine it, you can build it.