The white paper “The Path to Multi-Cloud Success: Why You Need Observability” provides compelling reasons for enterprises to adopt a multi-cloud strategy—reducing investment risk, avoiding cloud vendor lock-in, and taking advantage of best-of-breed services that solve a specific use case. It’s no wonder that 93% of enterprises have adopted a multi-cloud strategy.

Equally important are the reasons why enterprises adopt an observability platform such as New Relic One to help them successfully take advantage of multi-cloud environments. As the diversity of platforms and services grows along with the number of distributed applications running, it’s critical to gain a holistic view of the entire stack—from the digital customer experience, to the application, to the infrastructure—across all platforms.

This white paper introduces the New Relic One observability platform and describes how it can help eliminate blind spots, cut through complexity, and deliver unique, actionable insight into modern hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

As businesses adopt microservices patterns, embrace cloud native application development, and establish development teams spread across multiple geographies, it can be difficult to track how all the components of an application work together—especially when trying to isolate latency issues, errors, and anomalies. Add in a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, and it can become even more challenging to get to the root cause when an issue arises.

An observability platform can help: It gives your software teams insight across the entire stack—network, hardware, operating systems, and applications, as well as internal and external services. Most important, it gives you answers, context, and insight all in one place, without having to go from tool to tool.

There’s no greater need for an observability platform than when using containerization. Containers have freed many companies from potential cloud vendor lock-in, and containerization is a perfect example of how to benefit from a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy. Moving containers from on-premises to the cloud or even between different cloud vendors allows a company to select the best environment for its specific needs.

Over the past few years, Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for orchestrating and managing application containers. Virtually all cloud vendors have thrown their support behind Kubernetes as an industry standard.

With the rise of Kubernetes, companies need better visibility to understand and explore the performance of their applications and code running inside containers. To efficiently build and run modern software, you need visibility into the application layer—especially when those applications are running inside Kubernetes clusters in a multi-cloud architecture.

New Relic One is an observability platform designed for the modern infrastructure that powers hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. It offers three key components every observability practice should support: open instrumentation, connected data, and programmability.

New Relic One can collect data from any source to bring observability to multiple, diverse environments. It reduces tool proliferation and context switching when issues and emergencies arise, because it delivers interoperability for all data, whether the source is based on-premises or in a hybrid cloud or a multi-cloud environment.

Open APIs empower developers and operators to work with data in innovative ways, which can turn metrics and traces into easily visualized entities that provide deep insight and context.

New Relic One derives meaningful correlations of data points emerging from diverse sources. Instead of just aggregating metrics, the platform’s powerful AI capabilities can automatically highlight relationships between all the entities. The platform presents context in curated views that surface the most critical information, which is especially important when your applications are deployed on multiple cloud vendors.

With New Relic One, teams can start with a curated experience and create custom apps, dashboards, and even completely customized user interfaces. Based on the same tools that New Relic engineers use internally, enterprises can unlock new use cases and scenarios that are unique to their business.

Your teams can build workflows into custom apps and combine external data sets in real time to bring together relevant information from across your multi-cloud environment and your business.

New Relic One delivers the observability your software teams need to support popular use cases for modern infrastructure and multi-cloud environments.

As organizations continue to migrate to the cloud, they need to observe data from a multitude of sources—internal and external, and across any number of teams and systems—to detect and resolve potential issues quickly and efficiently. 

When modernizing your cloud-based applications to hybrid and multi-cloud environments to take advantage of the services cloud vendors offer, your organization needs visibility into the phases of the journey. New Relic complements and extends the tools and technologies offered by cloud vendors in migrating and modernizing workloads in the hybrid and multi-cloud world.

Observability data is a key success factor for any modernization initiative. It gives you contextual information about your infrastructure and applications and their impact on your customers and your business—before, during, and after the modernization effort.

• Before: An objective and holistic view of the application—including its running state, processes, infrastructure, business key performance indicators (KPIs), codebase, and issues—helps you decide how best to modernize applications. Baseline data also gives you a starting point from which to measure improvements.
• During: Testing your applications helps you make sure the transition isn’t causing any problems or slowdowns. You can use observability data to check the performance of application code, databases, and external services and compare them against pre-modernization baselines.
• After: When the modernized applications are running in their new cloud environments, you can measure your modernization success and identify opportunities to further optimize the applications for performance gains, efficient use of resources, and ease of operation.

Also, to help with observability challenges enterprises experience within a Kubernetes environment, New Relic’s Kubernetes cluster explorer lets you view related metrics, events, logs, and traces—in context, and correlated and curated in a visual experience.

Cluster explorer expands the Kubernetes monitoring capabilities already built into the New Relic platform. It applies advanced capabilities to filter, sort, and search for Kubernetes entities to help you understand the relationships and dependencies within an environment. Using data visualization techniques, cluster explorer gives you a fast and intuitive path to getting answers and understanding your Kubernetes environments. To learn more about Kubernetes and New Relic, read the white paper A Complete Introduction to Monitoring Kubernetes with New Relic.

Taking advantage of New Relic One throughout your modernization efforts helps you reduce risk, set priorities, and demonstrate your success.

New Relic Kubernetes cluster explorer

DevOps has gone mainstream, and organizations that embrace it are seeing repeated and growing success. However, a serious consequence of DevOps and cloud native technologies and techniques is the growing complexity of microservices, serverless, containers, and hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

This complexity creates a risk that organizations must take steps to mitigate before it negatively impacts IT and business outcomes. DevOps-committed companies that have not yet acquired the observability skills, best practices, and tools for this next phase of modern application development within hybrid and multi-cloud environments will find it extremely difficult to continue meeting their application performance and availability goals.

As much as continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are critical to DevOps, continuous monitoring is essential for observability of the environment that makes CI/CD possible, along with the rest of the automation used to control a cloud native architecture.

DevOps teams working with Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments need insight into the entire technology stack, including container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. These help teams build and deploy distributed applications that can run anywhere.

DevOps Four Golden Signals KPIs

New Relic One helps DevOps teams use observability to:

• Deliver high-quality software at scale
• Build a sustainable culture of innovation
• Respond and resolve issues quickly in modern multi-cloud environments

One of the side effects of adopting a multi-cloud strategy is the lack of visibility into resource utilization. This blind spot may lead to virtual machine, container, and cluster sprawl, which will increase infrastructure costs exponentially.

In multi-cloud environments, you should be able to identify and correct unexpected spikes in spending. When you have visibility into resource utilization and spending, you can fine-tune and optimize the usage of resources.

New Relic can help you monitor resource consumption and cloud spend. From a data perspective, it is merely another metric that the observability platform can collect. As with any other metric, you can visualize, report, and alert on the overall cloud spend, just like you can with any metrics, events, logs, and traces that New Relic collects. Using New Relic One is a great way to gain insight into cloud spending or about any other key factors that influence cost.

Cloud optimization for right-sizing and cloud spend justification

Any investment an organization makes should ultimately result in an enhanced customer experience, which has a direct impact on the bottom line. The New Relic One platform provides visibility through all the different parts of the technology stack to help businesses quickly troubleshoot any issues that may be degrading the digital experience for their customers.

New Relic gives all the stakeholders a single, shared view of the customer across multiple interactions, channels, and products. Through synthetic tests, real-user monitoring, and native mobile app monitoring, New Relic enables teams to monitor how customers interact with their applications, showing which features customers use and whether the performance differs by geography, browser, or device. This results in valuable insights delivered with speed, agility, and precision.

Insights into the customer journey through your applications

While most monitoring tools stop at the collection of metrics about application performance, errors, and availability, New Relic extends the observability of the technology stack to the observability of business.

Because New Relic One is built on the core principles of open instrumentation, connected entities, and programmability, organizations can tap into various data sources that directly reflect the business’s current state. For example, using New Relic One programmability, developers can create custom applications and dashboards that capture the KPIs of the business in real time.

In a retail and commerce scenario, this could translate into a custom dashboard showing the real-time stream of orders, inventory status, the health of third-party applications participating in the transaction, and even the revenue projected for the month and quarter.

View KPIs for your stores

Getting massive amounts of data from across the technology stack and multi-cloud environments isn’t enough. You need a way to gain context so that you can quickly take action when your system isn’t working correctly.

Applied intelligence takes observability data and uses machine learning and predictive analytics to make it meaningful and actionable. Sometimes called artificial intelligence for IT operations, or AIOps by industry analyst firm Gartner, applied intelligence delivers clear guidance, even when data sets are large and complex, as they often are in modern cloud environments.

New Relic AI helps customers detect problems earlier, understand incidents better, and find root causes faster. By automatically correlating, aggregating, and prioritizing incident data, it can help eliminate alert noise and accelerate resolution times.

By automatically enriching incident alerts with relevant context, guidance, and suggestions, New Relic AI can help you rapidly pinpoint the true root cause of a problem and how to resolve it—making it easier to monitor complex, ever-changing hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

New Relic observability enables active collaboration across IT teams by providing contextual information and dashboard experiences specific to their cloud initiatives.

Developers are looking for observability to accelerate their delivery of quality code, perform root cause analysis on code-level issues, and optimize application performance. Operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams need a way to monitor agreed-upon SLAs with business stakeholders, including providing availability, scalability, stability (uptime), and speed of provisioning, as well as supporting new business initiatives and end-user experience.

Business stakeholders are focused on tracking and quantifying the business impact delivered across cloud initiatives and at every phase of the cloud transformation journey. New Relic observability offers all of this information in contextual, correlated, curated, customizable, and real-time experiences so stakeholders can make well-informed decisions to accelerate their multi-cloud initiatives.

“New Relic is also invaluable in providing a single source of truth for the different layers of our cloud platform. As a dual-cloud provider (we use both AWS and GCP), we rely on New Relic to provide a single, synergistic view of how everything is working. Our global teams love it because it allows them to see the same information at the same time, which means they’re always in sync.” 

Lisa Box, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, WP Engine

When you have an open, connected, and programmable observability platform, the benefits to your business are profound: faster innovation, speedier deploys, less toil, reduced costs, and a better understanding of how to prioritize your finite time and attention.

This leads to a much deeper, shared understanding of your data, systems, and customers, improving your culture and leading to business growth. You gain real-time views into how your digital systems perform in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment and how your customers engage with your software. This lets you focus on what matters most—the business outcomes you deliver every day.