UPDATED 14:55 EDT / DECEMBER 02 2020

CLOUD

Q&A: How AWS and New Relic’s strategic partnership is making cloud ‘observable’

Keeping track of a couple of monolithic servers should be a piece of cake for application performance management software. But today we are far from monolithic — we run micro and distributed services. Such distributed systems may also scale so quickly and widely that it becomes nearly impossible for your everyday APM to keep track of them. APMs had to evolve. 

“Traditionally not too far ago, two or even three years, people thought of New Relic as an APM company. And I think with the launch this summer with New Relic One, we’ve really pivoted to a platform company,” said Jay Snyder (pictured), executive vice president and chief customer officer at New Relic Inc.

Now, the company has become one of the most powerful observability platforms, Snyder added. And by partnering with the right public cloud player — Amazon Web Services — its customers can now move their observability efforts to the cloud.

“Now, [companies] are starting to see the power of the platform and what we can do for them,” he stated. 

The New Relic One platform gives its customers agility, a streamlined workflow, and a predictable pricing model, according to Snyder, who spoke with Justin Warren, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the AWS and New Relic collaboration, observability, and New Relic’s value. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

So, we’ve got some news about New Relic and AWS’ strategic collaboration agreement. So tell us a bit more about what that actually is and what it means. 

Snyder: So we’ve been partners with AWS for years, but most recently we’ve announced a five-year strategic partnership that expands on the relationship that we already had. The [collaboration] takes all the work we’ve done to what I call the “next level.” It’s a joint technology development, where we’re initially going to be embedding New Relic One right into the AWS Management Console for ease of use and agility for anyone who’s developing and implementing a cloud strategy.

Big news as well, from an adoption relative to purchase power. [Now] you can purchase straight through the AWS Marketplace and leverage your existing AWS spend. 

Could you just give us a quick overview of what New Relic does. And then talk about what the strategic partnership means for the nature of New Relic’s business? 

Snyder: We’ve simplified what is a pretty large market with a whole bunch of products, just down to three simple things. A data platform, the ability to operationalize and action against that data, and the layer on top … machine learning. So it can be smarter than you can be, so it sees problems before they occur. And that’s what I would say observability is to us. And it’s the ability to do that horizontally and vertically across your entire infrastructure in your entire stack. 

How is New Relic helping customers to understand what they need to change about how they operate their business, as they adopt some of these methods? 

Snyder: So you are talking about operational efficiency. And there [in our observability maturity framework], we have effectively three or four different ways, and what I call boxes.  on how you would double-click and triple-click into a set of actions that would lead you to an operational outcome. So we have learned over time and applied a methodology and an approach to measure that. 

So depending on what you’re trying to do, whether it’s mean time to recover or mean time to detect, or if you’ve got hundreds of developers and you’re finding that they’re ineffective or inefficient, and you want to figure out how to deploy those resources to different parts of the environment so you can get them to better use their time … so depending on what your business objectives are and what you’re trying to achieve, we’re able to determine … your maturity level of being able to deliver against these. Are you even using the platform to the level of maturity that would allow you to gain this benefit realization? And that’s where we’re adding a massive amount of value. 

So give us some examples of things that you’ve seen that customers have used New Relic where they’ve stripped out some of that [workflow] they don’t really need to be doing. And then they’re turning that into new agility and have created something new. 

Snyder: This particular company in the media industry [is] a massive news conglomerate, and they have a whole bunch of individual business units. They were decentralized and non-standardized as it related to understanding how their software was getting created, how they were defining and determining the mean time to recover, performance metrics. All these things were happening around them in a highly complex environment. Just like we see with a lot of our customers, the complexity of the environments today are really driving the need for observability.

We looked at the full gamut of metrics, events, logs and traces, which wasn’t really being done in an observability strategy manner, and deployed that across the entire enterprise. So [we] created a standard platform for all the data in this particular environment. And as a byproduct, they were able to do a variety of things. One, the uptime for a lot of their customer-facing media applications improved greatly. [And] we actually started to pivot from driving costs to showing how they could make money.

So as a byproduct of this, they were able to repurpose dozens of resources off of what was traditionally maintenance mode and fighting fires in a reactive capability toward building new code and driving new innovation in the marketplace.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Sponsored by New Relic Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither New Relic nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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