Episode #90: Full-Stack Observability with the New Relic Explorer with Buddy Brewer

Serverless Chats

About Buddy Brewer

Buddy Brewer is the Field CTO for New Relic in the Americas. In this role, he helps customers get long-term value out of New Relic. Buddy has over 20 years of experience leading engineering and product management teams building tools to help developers and operations professionals deliver better digital experiences. A former entrepreneur in the observability space, Buddy has helped companies across every geography and industry in the world improve their software’s speed, quality, and user experience.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbrewer/
Twitter: @bbrewer
Personal Website: BuddyBrewer.com
New Relic Free Tier: https://newrelic.com/signup
New Relic Explorer: https://newrelic.com/platform/full-stack-observability

Watch this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y4n3fE8g9Ec

This episode is sponsored by New Relic.

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Buddy Brewer. Hey Buddy, thanks for joining me.

Buddy: Hey Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You are a Field CTO at New Relic so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what's new with New Relic.

Buddy: Yeah. Been with New Relic for a couple years now and in this Field CTO role I get to spend lots of time with our customers to help them get long-term value out of our observability platform. I'm an engineer by trade. Started my career as a software developer like many of our customers in New Relic. Spent substantially all of my career in product development in various capacities. Engineering, leading engineering teams, product management. And like I said, now I spend most of my time with customers helping them tackle their own observability challenges in their businesses. We're doing a lot right now with New Relic to help people make sense out of the volume of data and to help people pull all of the different types of metrics, events, logs, and traces that go into all this observability into views that they can actually use to help their customers get better experiences in a world where software architectures are just ... They're just becoming more complex by the month.

Jeremy: Right. Well, awesome. First of all, I want to thank New Relic for sponsoring this episode and for the amazing amount of support that they give to us here at Serverless Chats and what we do. So thank you very much for that. Now, you mentioned these tools that you're working on to be able to observe modern applications. And the new tool that was recently launched is the New Relic Explorer. I've looked at this thing. This is absolutely fascinating. It does all kinds of really great things. But I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit more about that product.

Buddy: Yeah. It's part of our full stack observability product in the New Relic One platform. So it's an in-place upgrade that everyone who uses full stack observability today gets. And what it does is it takes all of the information across all of the different dimensions that people are used to seeing in New Relic One, it pulls them together into new views that help people make sense at a macro level of what's going on in the health of their software across all of the dimensions that matter today. So infrastructure, front end, the application logic. All of that stuff in single views. And there's another part of New Relic Explorer that helps people understand in realtime what the key changes are that are happening in a way that requires zero configuration, which is really important to our customers today because the software architectures and the underlying containers and everything that serve those are changing so fast that people just don't have time to manually configure things today like they used to be able to.

Jeremy: Yeah, right. And one of the things too with cloud infrastructures, you've got all this telemetry data coming in from all these different places and most of the time ... I mean, I know at least what I had been doing is using a bunch of different dashboards and basically jumping between different things trying to figure out what's healthy, what's not healthy. And I love these new views that are in the New Relic Explorer because it actually shows you the changing ... If a problem is getting worse and worse and worse, it gives you this growing bubble. So these visualizations are really, really helpful. So I think that's Lookout right? That does that?

Buddy: That's right. Yeah, that's Lookout. The way that I think of Lookout is imagine if you could take something like the Unix diff command and apply it to all of your telemetry data comparing now versus any point in the past. Whereas the Unix diff command is a text console rendering, what Lookout does is it renders all of this in a visual display in a web browser so that you can see ... Like you said, you had these bubbles that really display two dimensions at the same time. The volume of data, whatever it is that you're looking at for a piece of data. A lot of people use this to visualize changes in errors or throughput or latency but it could also be order volume or really any metric that you want. That's the first dimension. And then the second dimension is the magnitude of changes. Right?

Jeremy: Right.

Buddy: What it helps you do is to zero-in, not just on the things that are red ... Because in environments where folks have thousands, or even tens of thousands for some of our enterprise customers, containers running on any given day, the nature of that design and the fault tolerance inherent in that architecture ensures that on any given day there's going to be stuff that's red. Right?

Jeremy: Right.

Buddy: So if a customer calls in about a problem, you log in, you see some things that are red. Well, some of that stuff was red yesterday. What Lookout helps you do is to focus specifically on those things that changed from healthy to not healthy around the same time as a customer-impacting problem. And then you can see all of the different pieces that also correlate to those changes so you could pull it all out and focus just on the things that matter.

Jeremy: Yeah. That's super helpful because, again, it's one of those things where ... I mean, I've worked as an SRE in the past and you get these constant errors sometimes that keep coming up and they're just kind of there. But sometimes it's the severity of the errors. It's how bad was it yesterday versus how bad is it today? Of course, we wouldn't leave a problem that long. But seeing those changes over time and seeing that growing bit of it, I think is just incredibly helpful from that sort of global view standpoint.

And then the other thing that's part of this, which I think is another really cool representation, is the Navigator piece. And this basically uses a red, yellow, and green sort of ... What is it? A hexagonal or an octagon or something like that. But basically shows these little blocks that show you what's healthy and what's not healthy and then you can dive down into each one of those to see more detail.

Buddy: That's right. And what we di...