Preparing the perfect software

New Relic has announced a series of new product innovations and community initiatives at its annual developer conference, FutureStack 2021, to help engineers make observability a data-driven approach to how they plan, build, deploy and run software. New Relic launched its new Kubernetes experience, powered by Auto-Telemetry with Pixie, which integrates with New Relic One to deliver instant Kubernetes observability without requiring users to update code or sample data. Additional highlights include enhancements to New Relic’s error tracking, network monitoring and programmability capabilities, as well as two new community offerings to bring the power of New Relic Full-Stack Observability to more engineers: New Relic Startup Edition and New Relic Student Edition.

“Now more than ever, the world relies on digital services and their underlying software to connect with family, friends and colleagues remotely, buy groceries for delivery, meet with doctors virtually and access entertainment at home. Our mission is to make observability a daily practice for millions of engineers by putting the power of telemetry data in their hands at every stage of the software lifecycle, so they can deliver great digital experiences to their customers,” said Bill Staples, CEO-elect at New Relic. “Our vision is brought to life in the innovations announced today and our FutureStack themes of Open-Build-Run. Our focus remains on engineers and their success, delivering transformative innovation that empowers them to level up their observability skills and create the next generation of software that powers the world.”

Instant Kubernetes Observability: Auto-Telemetry with Pixie

Integrating Pixie into New Relic’s Kubernetes solution[1]  removes the largest barriers to Kubernetes observability, namely the time and expertise required to manually instrument application code. Auto-Telemetry with Pixie gives engineers visibility into their Kubernetes clusters and workloads instantly without installing language agents. Available throughout the New Relic One platform, Pixie data enables engineers to debug faster than ever before. It also empowers engineers to observe everything on-cluster without sampling, then uses AI/ML models to send the most relevant subset of that data to New Relic’s Telemetry Data Platform for correlation with other services, intelligent alerting, and long term storage. Auto-Telemetry with Pixie is available today as an open beta.

Today’s news follows New Relic’s recent announcement that it is in the process of contributing Pixie Open Source as a project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) under an Apache 2.0 license, as part of New Relic’s commitment to making observability open for everyone. New Relic also recently announced it expanded its existing relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide its Pixie observability solution on AWS. [2] 

"Kubernetes' market share continues to grow as digital organizations and IT teams increase their use of containerized software and adopt cloud architectures. As such, Kubernetes observability is essential to support instant monitoring, troubleshooting and debugging," said Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, Management Software and DevOps, IDC. "Commercializing Pixie provides DevOps and engineering teams of all sizes with a Kubernetes native in-cluster observability experience to help them go beyond just production use-cases to plan, build, deploy and run more perfect software."

“Debugging and observability are two very important pieces in the software development lifecycle. Typically, setting these tools up is painful and time consuming for engineering teams. This is where Pixie makes life insanely simple,” said Roopak Venkatakrishnan, Staff Software Engineer at Bolt, a fintech company. Right from a single line install, to no instrumentation visibility, Pixie makes working with data-rich applications and Kubernetes fun again.[3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] ”

Additional New Relic innovations announced at FutureStack 21 include:

●  Error Tracking: New Relic Errors Inbox is a single place to view, triage and resolve errors across the full application stack, allowing developers to proactively fix errors before the customer experience is impacted. Unlike error tracking point solutions that only account for a portion of your data, New Relic Errors Inbox has rich, correlated data across the application stack – including APM, RUM, mobile and serverless data. Additionally, New Relic Errors Inbox provides detail down to the stack trace without ever leaving the New Relic One platform, making grouping and debugging workflows faster for developers. New Relic Errors Inbox is generally available today for customers using the U.S. data center.

●  Network Observability: New Relic partnered with network observability company Kentik[9]  to extend its industry-leading observability into the network layer. Extending New Relic One to include network observability from Kentik streamlines operations by ensuring that DevOps and network teams can work better together to resolve issues quickly, including being able to identify whether the root cause of an issue is related to the network. Network Observability is available today as an early access program.

●  Custom Dashboard Visualizations: With the Custom Visualizations launcher, DevOps teams can use open source or proprietary libraries to create custom charts and other visualizations that provide more visibility into applications running in production, as well as third-party data sources. New Relic is partnering with engineering and design consultancy Formidable to integrate their open source charting library as out-of-the-box visualization templates for developers. New Relic is also launching its Programmability Certification Program[10] [11] , offering the opportunity for developers to validate their expertise in extending New Relic One while highlighting their in-demand observability skillset.