The monolithic application days are over. Businesses are now looking toward smaller component-based services, such as containers, serverless computing and microservices, to develop their apps. But how do these businesses make sure that all underlying infrastructure and apps running through those small ephemeral services remain healthy and at top performance?

Traditional application performance monitoring provided full visibility of infrastructure and apps through dashboards, which were a fantastic solution for monolithic applications. But monitoring resources on those types of dynamic ecosystems can be incredibly challenging. It may require tons of different monitoring tools and collaboration teams. Thus, technology has to move beyond visibility. 

Having one central observability platform that is connected and programmable to see them all can be the key. And this type of observability to “see all” has been the goal of software analytics company New Relic Inc. 

“Dashboards are good, but often dashboards are incomplete to get the most out of the data we’re collecting,” said Lew Cirne (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of New Relic Inc. “That’s why we’re claiming we have the first and only platform for observability. It’s only a platform if you can build software on it, and New Relic One is the first software development platform for observability applications.”

Cirne spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the New Relic FutureStack event in New York City. They discussed New Relic’s path, agent versus agentless and the company’s new observability platform (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Give us a bit about the state of the industry.

Cirne: When we first started out, that was actually a bit of an evangelical sale where we had to convince people that they needed to observe their software. Now it’s become a must-do thing, and that’s why observability has become a household term. What we’re so excited about is that we’re delivering the first observability platform.

You want it all in one place, and more importantly, you want it to be connected so that you can see the relationship between the application and its server or infrastructure and the user experience all in one connected platform. 

Miniman: The IT industry in general is known for its fragmentation. Today things are moving much faster. There’s usually a lot of different teams and a lot of different tools in there. How does New Relic fit across that landscape, and how are you helping to pull things together? 

Cirne: Certainly, the industry’s moving from the monolithic application to the component-based application, often running in smaller and smaller services. And with that comes a proliferation of things to monitor, and often a proliferation of tools. 

What we’re announcing today is that we’re opening up our platform to consume telemetry from open-source, agentless sources. So that if you’ve got something like Prometheus that’s gathering data from Kubernetes, that can go straight into New Relic and be treated as first-class data so that you don’t have to switch between a bunch of tools. None of our customers want that. They want it all in one place.

Miniman: A lot of the logging and tracing information out there isn’t agent-led. What do you see as the future of agents, and what are some of the challenges of pulling all of these various data types together? 

Cirne: What we see, particularly in large enterprises, is they want both. They have a portfolio of more than a thousand applications. They want to observe them all. Most of them they’ll want to drop an agent in because they don’t have time to re-instrument them, but they still need to see them. Some of them may want to manually instrument because they want a higher level of control or they want to adopt an open-source API like OpenTelemetry. 

Miniman: You’ve laid out the case in a strong way as to why New Relic One should be the platform for the monitoring observability. I think you undersold a little bit the [New Relic Database] piece. You showed a demo of 10 terabytes and being able to change it in a snap. 

Cirne: You know, NRDB is pretty magical. The thing that our customers need to know is that all your metrics, all your events, all your logs, all your traces going into the same database with one query language … that’s so much better than going to Elasticsearch and using its query language for logs, then using a totally different query language for getting at your metrics, and then trying to stitch it all together. We put it all not only in one cloud, but in one database. That is the most powerful telemetry database in the world, which is NRDB. 

Miniman: Observability’s been talked about in the industry for a while. Give us a little bit as to how we got to today. 

Cirne: Now where we see people going is, now that all of this telemetry data is coming ideally into one place like New Relic, our customers are saying, “I need to go beyond dashboards. Dashboards are good, but often dashboards are incomplete to get the most out of the data we’re collecting.” That’s why we’re claiming we have the first and only platform for observability, with a capital P. What do I mean by that? It’s only a platform if you can build software on it, and New Relic One is the first software development platform for observability applications. 

Miniman: How would you reframe the market today and New Relic, where it needs to be today and going forward? 

Cirne: APM really was the precursor to observability. It was the notion that these are complex systems. They need to be observed at high granularity. APM gave birth to observability, so when New Relic first came along, [we said] “Let’s democratize APM.” And as observability came along, we saw this as an opportunity to open up the platform. 

Miniman: What do you want your customers to take away here from FutureStack 2019?

Cirne: My belief is that the future of observability is you need a platform. [And] that platform needs to be open, connected and programmable. We have such a beautiful, easy developer experience. So within seconds, you can be building an application that takes the telemetry data in New Relic and turns it into actionable business insights for your company. 

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of New Relic FutureStack. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the New Relic FutureStack event. Neither New Relic Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE