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New Relic Adds Support for Amazon EC2, Joins AWS Partner Program

• By John K. Waters
• October 26, 2015

New Relic Inc. is adding a set of monitoring features to its Software Analytics Cloud specifically designed for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the company announced at the recent Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) re:Invent conference. The new features will support the management of large EC2 deployments and enable users to combine performance data from both the application and cloud infrastructure layers of their technology stack, the company said.

This application-centric approach is meant to "empower customers to better leverage the speed, focus and economics of the AWS Cloud," said Al Sargent, New Relic's senior director of product marketing.

"Both New Relic and AWS have the same vision for how modern software should be built," Sargent told ADTmag. "It needs to run in the cloud. And more than half of New Relic's customers have applications that run on AWS." The company also announced that it has earned the AWS Partner Network (APN) Mobile Competency designation, which recognizes APN partners that have deep experience with mobile-first development.

The New Relic Software Analytics Cloud is a multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) software analytics solution designed to help companies securely monitor their production software in many environments without having to build or maintain dedicated infrastructures.

"Monitoring tools that were built in the 1990s and early 2000s weren't built for the complexity of modern modular and distributed software architectures," Sargent said, "They were built for a world in which you racked a server and it was pretty well fixed. You wouldn't buy a bunch of additional servers for Cyber Monday and then get rid of them after the holiday season. The world has changed, and there's a real need now for true cloud monitoring."

The list of new AWS monitoring capabilities currently being developed includes, among others: Dynamic Workload Visibility, which lets users see only the useful EC2 instances that matter to the app and the business; Blindspot Detection, which shows which EC2 instances do not have server monitoring installed; Flexible Performance Rollups, which allows the EC2 data to be sliced and diced in useful ways; Monitoring for Over-Provisioning, which helps to control the AWS spend; and 60-Second Install, which integrates New Relic's Analytics Cloud with AWS in about a minute.

The new AWS monitoring features planned for the New Relic Software Analytics Cloud are currently in private beta. As of this writing the program is oversubscribed, Sargent said, but those interested can still sign up for notifications on the company's Web site.

New Relic released its original Insights real-time analytics platform in 2014. Lew Cirne, who has been credited with creating the Application Performance Management (APM) market, founded the San Francisco-based company in 2008.