Article

6 Ways New Relic Can Help You

Do DevOps Better
DevOps combines collaboration and transparency to speed develop-
ment, implementation, and innovation throughout the organization.
But for DevOps to drive business success, teams must collect and
share critical data in real time across the entire organization—from
the performance impact of the latest code release to the percentage
of downtime during the latest traffic spike. Of course, that’s just the
beginning: For DevOps efforts to truly pay off, you need to show key
stakeholders that your work has a positive impact on your business.
Here are six ways New Relic can help you move faster and ensure
your DevOps initatives are working.

1. Get everyone on the same page.

Running a digital business is a team sport, with involvement across
development, operations, and business teams. However, as the rate
of change increases in DevOps environments, these diverse teams
often get out of sync because they rely on different data sources
and tools. New Relic charts, dashboards, and alerts can create
a single, powerful, and easy-to-understand source of truth for
stakeholders across the company. That can mean sharing dev and
ops perspectives using New Relic Insights dashboards or tracking
environment health status via Service Maps in New Relic APM, which
can speed top-level troubleshooting by providing a single pane of
glass that highlights throughput, error rate, and latency for every
connected service. New Relic Infrastructure meanwhile, can surface
server issues that are affecting performance, and you can use New
Relic Synthetics scripts to monitor SLA compliance by checking if
the app is meeting at agreed-upon uptime goals.

It’s easier to understand each other when

you’re looking at the same data.
6 Ways New Relic Can Help You Do DevOps Better

2. Use Dynamic Baseline Alerts

to get started fast. Everyone can point to an item on the
Given the hundreds of moving parts you need to track in modern dashboard and say, “It got bad when
software environments, it can take a long time for teams to figure we did this!”
out alert thresholds for them all. Whether you’re dealing with code
metrics, database metrics, hardware metrics, or business metrics,
Dynamic Baseline Alerts help you automatically set useful initial
5. Master Game Days.
baselines for all your metrics, without having to do research. Then
Game-day simulations are a great way to test the limits of your
you can refine them further over time to find the sweet spot that
system. But what’s the best way to find out if the processes in your
flags problems that could affect customers without waking you up
runbooks are robust enough to survive various problems, and how
with false positives. DevOps is about shared responsibility across
do you validate your production steps under load? Just as important,
diverse teams, and alerts can help everyone involved take a vested
how do you track the effects of the stress tests you conduct? For
interest in the status of the application.
the former, Game Day “Red Teams” can use New Relic Synthetics
to simulate problematic traffic scenarios and try to break things.
3. Keep an eye on the container stack.
The “Blue Team,” meanwhile, can rely on the entire New Relic
To truly understand what’s going on with your apps, you need insight Digital Intelligence Platform—particularly New Relic Insights dash-
into your entire technology stack, from the infrastructure to the code boards and New Relic APM alerts—to help track what’s happen-
to the user interface to the customer experience, on the web or on ing in real time, determine solutions, and make sure they’re actually
a mobile device. Increasingly, that includes container technologies solving the problem.
like Docker, which help DevOps teams build and deploy distributed
applications that can run anywhere. Unfortunately, containers can
6. Tie software performance
also create a blind spot for monitoring as many containers live only
to business goals.
for a few minutes or less, not long enough for traditional monitoring
to notice their existence. Use New Relic’s Docker monitoring to illu- As with any transformation effort, for your DevOps efforts to be
minate that blind spot with an app-centric view of the relationships a true success, you need to show more than better software
between applications, servers, and Docker containers, helping bring results. You need to demonstrate positive business benefits. That
context to the tracking of short-lived containers. can be more complicated than you think. One specific change, for
example, might cut response time (which is usually good) but
4. Track changes across the deployment also reduce conversions (which is pretty much always bad). Using
New Relic Insights, you can create dashboards to track not just
pipeline and infrastructure.
software performance, but business metrics like conversion rates,
When using continuous integration/continuous deployment, the rapid average revenue per user, customer acquisition costs, churn rates,
pace of change can obscure the complex effects of any given update. subscription renewals, and recurring revenue. Shared goals help
New Relic can give you full-stack visibility into the real-time impact of everyone relate their work to a measurable set of indicators of
changes at every layer of your app, from customer experience to code success. This data-driven approach can improve prioritization and
and containers. Deployment Markers in New Relic APM, for example, decision-making.
help you track when change events happen— even if they’re not instru-
mented in New Relic—and what was impacted, from the end-user expe-
rience to application performance. New Relic Infrastructure, meanwhile,
If your software engineers don’t know
adds change and performance monitoring to capacity and utilization
issues—all married in the same interface. You can also use Insights
what a conversion rate is, you probably
dashboards to measure everything from deploys per engineer/team and aren’t DevOpsing!
number of deploys to specific apps or failed and successful deploys.

Want to learn more about turbocharging your DevOps transformation? Visit www.newrelic.com/devops.

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