Nerdlog Roundup: Embrace the Purple Bubble, Remove Instrumentation Anxiety, and Fork Our Docs

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Whether you’re trying to detect abnormal behavior you didn’t even know about in your apps and systems or want to reduce your instrumentation anxiety, this week’s Nerdlog dives into the latest new features designed to make your life better as an engineer.

New Relic Lookout: Embrace the purple bubble

Drill down instantly into performance changes in your apps or systems with New Relic Lookout. The brighter the color, the more severe the change, and the bigger the size, the bigger the scale.

Lindsy Farina, Senior Product Manager, and Andrew Ettinger, Senior Software Engineering Manager, demonstrate how New Relic Lookout helps engineers dive deep into anomalous behavior—particularly for which they haven’t set alerts.

Lookout enables you to do the following:

• Fill gaps in monitoring with full coverage by default, with no configuration or setup required.
• Immediately see anything deviating from normal across your entire estate.
• Proactively spot emerging problems in a real-time visualization of all system components.
• Gain faster incident resolution through automatically surfaced causes and effects.
• Analyze any data in the Telemetry Data Platform, including third-party, open, and custom data.
• Launch into other areas of New Relic One for a deeper understanding.

Getting started with Lookout:

• If you’re already sending data to New Relic, you already have access to the New Relic Lookout view—no configuration required.
• To access, select Explorer in the navigation bar.
• Then select the Lookout button in the upper right to see the view of what’s changed.
• Click on a highlighted circle to get important details like activity, tags, and key metrics.

Embrace the purple bubble here.

Guided install: Remove the anxiety from instrumentation

With guided install, you can instrument your applications and infrastructure to start seeing your data in New Relic within minutes. With a single CLI command, guided install discovers all the systems running on your hosts and recommends automatically instrumentation options to you.

The capability eliminates error-prone configuration and drastically reduces the effort needed to get visibility into your systems. Built as an extensible, open-sourced architecture, recipes are stored in YAML files in our Open Install Library on GitHub, allowing you to modify them or even build your own for your own unique instrumentation needs.

Justin Eveland, Software Engineer at New Relic, shows how guided install works.

Getting started with guided install:

Click here to try out our guided install today, or select Add More Data at the upper right of your home screen, and select Guided install.

Open source docs: Fork these docs

In a reader survey last year, more than 50% of you said you were interested in editing our docs, and 70% said you’d like to file issues. Now is your time to shine.

Getting started on our open source docs site:

Select Edit page on the right panel anywhere on docs.newrelic.com or visit the GitHub repo.