Accelerate software release velocity

Now, more than ever, technology drives business innovation to target existing and next-gen customers. To keep pace, businesses must innovate faster, delivering superior software experiences without compromising cost or efficiency. New Relic offers deep insights into critical software applications and systems. 

Leveraging its features accelerates software updates, enhances quality assurance, and identifies key priorities for positive outcomes, whether cost reduction, efficiency optimization, or driving innovation and customer experience. Outlined below are three areas where New Relic enhances release cycles, fosters faster innovation, improves quality assurance, and prioritizes collaboration among teams.

Release cycles and innovation

Delays in product releases

Product release delays can impede business growth, affect customer satisfaction, and lead to significant costs. New Relic application performance monitoring (APM) offers real-time visibility into application performance, monitoring code execution, infrastructure, and dependencies. This continuous monitoring provides insights into bottlenecks, performance issues, and resource constraints, allowing teams to proactively resolve issues and ensure smoother software delivery.

Unexpected errors can disrupt product releases. New Relic error tracking captures error data, like stack traces and affected users, to uncover root causes. Customizable alerting and seamless integration with IT service management (ITSM) tools enable real-time notifications, ensuring swift responses to mitigate risks and maintain release timelines.

Successful product releases depend on a solid infrastructure. New Relic infrastructure monitoring offers extensive visibility into servers, containers, and cloud environments. Monitoring key metrics like resource utilization and network latency helps teams identify bottlenecks and constraints. They can then optimize infrastructure, enhance configurations, ensure scalability, and minimize delays proactively.

Capacity planning and scalability are vital for meeting user demands. New Relic monitoring helps teams understand resource utilization, identify bottlenecks, and plan infrastructure capacity effectively.

Slow rates of innovation

Organizations are constantly under increasing pressure to innovate and deliver cutting-edge products. If an organization is slow to innovate, they will be left behind by their competition.

New Relic drives innovation through continuous feedback loops and comprehensive analytics, providing insights into user behavior, performance metrics, and system health. This data empowers organizations to make informed decisions during product development, aligning efforts with customer needs for impactful releases. 

The New Relic observability platform fosters collaboration and agile workflows with shared dashboards, real-time alerting, and messaging tools, enabling effective communication across teams. By promoting collaboration, organizations leverage diverse expertise and drive faster innovation through iterative development cycles. 

Moreover, New Relic facilitates experimentation and performance optimization with controlled experiments and A/B tests, allowing teams to validate hypotheses and measure feature impact. Through data-driven decision-making, fueled by the New Relic observability platform, organizations accelerate product innovation

Difficulty in prediction

Predictability is crucial in the product development lifecycle, as it allows organizations to plan effectively, meet customer expectations, and ensure smooth releases. New Relic offers capabilities that can significantly increase the predictability of product release times.

The New Relic observability platform provides historical performance analysis, enabling organizations to analyze past release cycles and track changes. By examining metrics like response times and error rates over time, teams gain insights into factors affecting release timelines. This data-driven approach improves predictability by highlighting areas needing attention and helps set realistic release schedules based on past experiences.

New Relic supports continuous testing and deployment, including continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Integrating it with pipelines ensures ongoing performance monitoring during testing and deployment, catching issues early to maintain release timelines. This provides real-time insights, enabling rapid iterations to meet deadlines and enhance predictability.

Quality assurance

When it comes to quality assurance, there can be challenges when managing the high numbers of bugs and performance issues uncovered in testing while still trying to make release deadlines. 

If the wrong issues and bugs are prioritized, change windows could be missed—or worse, a customer experience is degraded, resulting in lost revenue for the business. Therefore, it’s critical that issues and bugs are uncovered early and often, and prioritized based upon business impact.

New Relic monitoring and alerting streamline the setup of customized alerts, which is particularly useful for staging and testing environments. For instance, markers can indicate when changes were made, aiding in identifying their impact on the application environment. If a change causes unintended issues, quick rollbacks can occur before customers are affected, mitigating business impact.

As load increases in staging or test environments, New Relic alerts monitor key test metrics, signaling deviations from normal trends proactively. Its distributed tracing offers insights into data flow, infrastructure, and downstream services down to the code level, enhancing customer experience visibility.

When the problems get even more complex, and more granular visibility is needed into the code, New Relic CodeStream gives developers insights into their code right at the code-line level. This makes it easy to identify root causes and get right into fixing the most important bugs and bottlenecks.

Additionally, New Relic identifies dependency vulnerabilities and security gaps, particularly beneficial in staging environments to address potential business-impacting vulnerabilities before production.

With New Relic’s easy-to-use interface, teams can easily identify performance bottlenecks and thus address issues and bugs long before they hit production, therefore preventing them from progressing into downstream applications that ultimately affect the customers.

Prioritization and collaboration

Identifying high-impact work

In today's software world, site reliability engineers (SREs) and DevOps ensure app reliability. They rely on comprehensive data to prioritize effectively. New Relic offers tools to identify high-impact work efficiently. Its platform provides real-time visibility across the tech stack, analyzing diverse data sources for proactive monitoring. SREs and DevOps leverage New Relic for efficient task prioritization.

SREs and DevOps teams can leverage New Relic to identify high-impact work in the following ways:

• Monitoring application performance: With New Relic APM features, teams can gain real-time insights into critical metrics such as response times, error rates, and resource utilization. This data helps identify performance bottlenecks and prioritize optimizations effectively. 
• Analyzing infrastructure health: New Relic infrastructure monitoring capabilities provide visibility into the health and performance of the underlying infrastructure components. By monitoring server metrics, container performance, and network activity, teams can identify infrastructure-related issues impacting application performance and prioritize improvements. 
• Incident response and troubleshooting: New Relic equips teams with powerful incident response and troubleshooting tools. Real-time visibility into logs, distributed traces, and error analytics enables quick identification of root causes, reducing mean time to resolution. Prioritizing remediation efforts based on impactful incidents and recurring problems optimizes workflow. 
• Understanding the user experience: New Relic enables monitoring and analysis of user experience across platforms and geographies. By capturing user interactions, performance metrics, and business KPIs, teams gain insights into how application performance affects end users. This information guides prioritization of improvements to enhance user satisfaction and drive business outcomes.

To effectively identify high-impact work, SREs and DevOps teams can utilize the New Relic observability platform in the following ways: 

• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with business objectives to focus on critical areas. 
• Utilize alerting and anomaly detection features to proactively identify and address issues promptly. 
• Foster collaboration and share insights across teams, involving stakeholders from development, operations, and business units.

Team accountability

The New Relic observability platform promotes team accountability by providing visibility, collaboration, and data-driven insights. 

• Visibility and transparency: New Relic offers real-time visibility into application, infrastructure, and user experience performance. Teams can monitor progress, identify bottlenecks, and evaluate performance against objectives. 
• Collaboration and communication: New Relic facilitates sharing dashboards, reports, and insights, fostering collaboration and open communication among team members. 
• Incident management and resolution: New Relic incident management capabilities provide alerts, playbooks, and timelines for efficient incident resolution, ensuring individual accountability. 
• Performance and efficiency tracking: Monitoring key metrics in New Relic allows teams to evaluate performance, meet benchmarks or service-level objectives (SLOs), and optimize workflows. 
• Continuous improvement and learning: New Relic enables teams to analyze historical data, incident reports, and user feedback for continuous improvement, fostering a culture of learning and accountability. 

The New Relic observability platform empowers teams with visibility, collaboration, incident management, performance tracking, and continuous improvement. By utilizing New Relic tools and insights, teams foster accountability, drive performance improvements, and deliver impactful results.

Instrumentation-friendly pricing

The New Relic consumption pricing model offers transparency, scalability, and control. With features such as easy dashboarding, querying of data, drop rules, and forecasting capabilities, New Relic empowers organizations to optimize their usage and costs effectively. 

• Transparent data ingest and spend tracking: New Relic provides easy-to-use dashboards and querying capabilities to track data ingest and spend. Customers can monitor their data volume and associated costs in real-time, gaining insights into their resource utilization and optimizing their usage based on actual needs. 
• Forecasting and planning: With the New Relic observability platform, organizations can forecast and plan their future data ingest and associated costs. By analyzing historical trends and growth patterns, customers can make informed decisions about scaling their monitoring efforts and budgeting for the future. 
• Drop rules for optimization: New Relic allows users to set up drop rules, giving them control levers to optimize data ingestion and costs. Drop rules enable customers to selectively drop or exclude certain types of data, reducing unnecessary ingestion and ensuring efficient use of resources. 
• Easy dashboarding and querying: The New Relic platform offers intuitive dashboarding and querying capabilities, allowing users to visualize and analyze their data effectively. This enables organizations to gain actionable insights, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their systems and costs. 

The New Relic consumption-based pricing ensures transparency, scalability, and control. Its intuitive dashboarding and querying simplify data tracking and spending oversight, with forecasting aiding future planning. Drop rules afford users easy control over ingestion and costs. Leveraging these tools, organizations efficiently manage resources, trim expenses, and enhance operational efficiency.

Conclusion

By leveraging New Relic, organizations can efficiently manage resource utilization, optimize costs, and gain valuable insights for improved operational efficiency. Typical outcomes for organizations can be up to 25% faster time to market with increased deployment efficiencies, 43% more efficient troubleshooting in reduced change failure rates, and a 23% decrease in batch times, all of which promote greater innovation, assurance, and a more profitable future.