Sankofa at New Relic: Bridging Legacy and Innovation

In the world of observability, there’s a simple truth: you can’t improve what you don’t see. Throughout February, we’ve taken the time to bring both the history of tech and the voices of our community into full view.

Between competitive trivia, scavenger hunts, book club chats, and volunteering, we’ve spent this month celebrating as a community. These moments were a great reminder of how much our daily work is rooted in the breakthroughs of Black innovators. From the basic ways our teams connect to the systems that help us grow, their contributions are a vital part of the foundation we build upon every day. While the month is drawing to a close, we want to acknowledge the legacy of those who came before us and celebrate the Relics who are writing the next chapter of that story today.

When we think about observability and monitoring at New Relic, we are thinking about the health of the digital world. But that world wouldn’t exist without pioneers like:

• Dr. Marian Croak pioneered VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), the backbone of the Google Meet calls we use for collaboration every day.
• Mark Dean co-invented the IBM PC and the color monitor, giving us the first visual interfaces to monitor system health.
• Valerie Thomas developed real-time data systems at NASA, paving the way for how we process and observe massive streams of data today.
• Alan Emtage created Archie, the world’s first search engine, long before the modern web existed, fundamentally changing how we locate information.

Connecting Our Past and Future

The bridge between these pioneers and our current work is best captured by the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa: the idea that we must reach back to the past to move forward. In the spirit of the Sankofa symbol, where a bird reaches back for a precious egg while its feet face the future, we recognize that our progress is built on the breakthroughs of those who came before us. By understanding where we started, we empower our own Relics to carry that momentum into the next chapter of innovation. 

The Next Chapter: Relics Making an Impact

One thing we prioritize at New Relic is our One Team value - understanding the role we all play to achieve our goals and working collaboratively to do so. We recognize that everyone plays a very important part in our success.

It’s been said that it is much easier to do something when you’ve seen it done before. While we recognize those who paved the way, we also want to celebrate the people driving our mission forward right now. In the spirit of highlighting recent wins and accomplishments, we’re proud to spotlight a few of our own Relics:

Zyria Lott - Associate Technical Industrial Designer: Zyria is incredibly proud of the launch of the New Relic Certified APM Practitioner Associate (APA) exam. This project solved a key challenge by formalizing APM expertise, giving customers a definitive way to prove their mastery of complex application data.

Seeing professionals earn their APA credentials daily has been a fantastic validation of the program's impact. Reaching the finish line was a true highlight for Zyria, especially after the rewarding experience of collaborating with product teams and users to bring this vision to life.

Explore the APA certification here: https://learn.newrelic.com/page/new-relic-certified-apm-practitioner-associate-apa 

Spence Taylor - Lead Developer Relations Engineer: While on the Logs team, Spence was tasked with building Live Tail, a standard feature that streams logs to users during ingestion. While most products at the time only offered raw, unprocessed logs with basic text search, Spence proposed a fully processed Live Tail feature that matched the speed of the competition. This innovation allowed customers to filter streams specifically to what they wanted to see. As the first feature the team trusted Spence to lead, the project served as a major turning point, confirming Spence was doing the work Spence was meant to do.

Brittany Mgbam - Security Automation Engineer: Brittany and her team recently hit a major milestone by deploying a unified agent across our entire cloud platform. By moving everything to a single platform, she helped New Relic gain full data visibility, smarter detections, and much faster response times for our entire cloud infrastructure. Crossing the finish line together was an incredible achievement; after all the hard work she put in, seeing it all go live was a massive win. It’s a great feeling to know she has built something that makes our systems significantly more efficient.

Tariq Bradford - Business Development Representative: Tariq joined the BDR team seven months ago and has successfully completed his onboarding. During this time, he has gotten up to speed on the core tools and refined his strategy for building his book of business. By deep-diving into the company mission, Tariq has been able to connect more meaningfully with potential customers, and he is looking forward to continued growth at New Relic.

Gwen Richardson - Principal Solutions Consultant: Gwen recently recorded a Transaction 360 demonstration for another team member to share with customers, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The demo was so effective that it prompted customers to reach out immediately asking how they could enable the features themselves. Her work directly led to 10 different customers enabling Transaction 360, Maps, and Auto-Discovery. The recording even circulated through the Product Management team, where it was highly praised for its quality and clarity. Looking ahead, Gwen plans to continue this momentum by recording and sharing demos for even more new services to help our customers get the most out of the platform.

As our Relics continue to innovate, lead, and make a difference, we hope their success inspires others to do the same for years to come. If you’re looking to make an impact, we invite you to explore our open career opportunities and help us drive the future of observability.