News

New Relic Advances its 'Full Stack Observability' Mission

• By John K. Waters
• February 11, 2021

Software analytics company New Relic introduced a new tool this week in its evolving observability product portfolio. Part of the company's "reimagined full-stack observability experience," New Relic Explorer brings together an organization's telemetry data from across its applications and infrastructure to provide a live view--a kind of "mission control"-- of an entire software system's health and performance.

With this new single source of truth, the company says, engineers can quickly discover emerging performance issues and take action to get systems back to full health before customers or employees are affected.

Observability refers to the practice of instrumenting systems and applications to collect log data, metrics, and traces to provide actionable insights. It's different from monitoring, which provides instrumentation for the collection and display of app and system data--the what, but not the why. San Francisco-based New Relic's founder is often credited with creating the APM market with the launch of the Insights real-time analytics platform in 2014.

"I believe the opportunity in observability is enormous," New Relic's chief product officer, Bill Staples, told AppTrends in an earlier interview. "Given the complexity of distributed systems, it has become an essential ingredient for building software nowadays."  

Observability has, indeed, become a must-have capability, and so has the "single dashboard," says IDC analyst Stephen Elliot.

"For digital organizations and their IT teams, real-time visibility into critical software infrastructures is crucial in keeping their business running smoothly," Elliot said in a statement. "Customers now demand real-time awareness and observability into IT environments via a single dashboard; providing them with simplicity and speed for identifying, solving and preventing problems before they impact the customer experience."

"IT environments have become increasingly complex and engineering teams use a myriad of tools to see the performance of their entire tech stack, but there's no way to see everything in one place and quickly take action," Staples said in a statement. "This leads to fragmented visibility, cumbersome and inefficient workflows, and out-of-control costs. "With this launch, New Relic has delivered true full-stack observability so engineers can finally get their arms around all of their telemetry data to quickly understand what's happening and resolve issues faster before they become problems."

New Relic Explorer comprises two components: New Relic Lookout, which provides an IT-estate-wide, real-time view of any changes in telemetry data, including third-party and open source data; and New Relic Navigator, which provides a color display of the health of each application, service, container, function, and host.  

All existing New Relic customers will be upgraded to New Relic Explorer automatically in the coming weeks, the company says.