New Relic has updated its observability platform to include the ability to better detect and track errors in addition to monitoring vulnerabilities.
At the same time, an instance of the New Relic observability platform that runs natively on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform is now also generally available.
Manav Khurana, general manager for observability product and chief growth office for New Relic, said the alliance will enable Microsoft Azure customers to consume New Relic as part of their existing Microsoft Azure services contract.
New Relic already provides an errors inbox to track issues, but is now adding a tool to track the impact an error might have by correlating data across traces and logs. The company has also integrated its platform with Slack to make it simpler for IT teams to generate alerts when vulnerabilities are introduced into codebases and manage errors more collaboratively.
Similarly, New Relic is also looking to foster greater collaboration between software engineering and cybersecurity teams. A New Relic Vulnerability Management tool with no additional configuration required captures security signals generated via the company’s Telemetry Data Platform in a way that can be analyzed using an interactive application security testing (IAST) tool that New Relic gained with its acquisition of K2 Cyber Security. Additional IAST capabilities available in preview include the ability to leverage a patented deterministic technique to identify and provide automated vulnerability validation that highlights a proof-of-exploit.
The overall goal is to provide more visibility and context for organizations that are implementing best DevSecOps practices, said Khurana.
It’s still relatively early days as far as the integration of observability platforms into DevOps workflows is concerned. A recent survey conducted by New Relic found most organizations don’t expect to have robust observability practices in place by 2025. While most organizations have tools to monitor predefined metrics today, there is a significant gap between observability platforms that enable IT teams to determine the root cause of an IT issue and monitoring platforms that generate an alert whenever a threshold is exceeded.
In fact, many organizations have too many monitoring tools that often surface conflicting or redundant alerts, noted Khurana.
One way or another, more codebases are being instrumented. As that process continues to evolve, the agents embedded in that code make it simpler to collect the logs and traces needed to advance observability. The challenge, as always, is that it takes time for the number of fully instrumented applications to exceed the number of legacy applications that are either partially instrumented or not instrumented at all.
As IT environments become more complex, the need for observability is becoming much more pressing at a time when most IT teams are more short-handed than ever, noted Khurana.
Regardless of approach, there’s no doubt that observability, with patience, will impact the management of IT for the better.
