This week, New Relic has made a service level indicator (SLI) and service level objective (SLO) available through the New Relic One monitoring platform. The new feature allows DevOps teams to personalize metrics, create unified health reports, and send alerts gaining valuable Full-Stack Observability.
What are the Benefits of Using New Relic’s SLO Tools?
New Relic’s SLO tools can help DevOps teams customize metrics, unified health reports, and alerts. By using these tools, teams can improve communication and collaboration around service-level goals. Additionally, New Relic’s SLO tools can help teams identify and fix problems before they impact users.
New Relic’s SLO tools will help teams identify and fix problems before they impact users
The objective is to enable DevOps teams to more easily optimize services that span multiple applications and software components, according to Alex Kroman, general manager and senior vice president for product engineering at New Relic.
“As software becomes more complex, so do the dependencies between services,” Kroman said. “To deliver great customer experiences, you need to understand how all of your services are performing together and where any problems might lie.”
With New Relic’s SLI and SLO tools, teams can set up health dashboards that track overall system performance against defined SLOs. The tools also allow teams to send alerts when system performance falls below an SLO.
New Relic’s SLO tools allow for personalization, unified health reports, and alerts
“The goal is to help DevOps teams move from reactive to proactive problem solving,” Kroman said. “By being able to see all of their services in one place and understand how they’re performing against specific objectives, they can identify and fix problems before they impact customers.”
The use of scoring metrics, for example, is nothing new. T-shaped organizations have always been tracking and meeting SLOs. However, as app platforms have grown more distributed — in part due to the popularity of microservices — meeting and maintaining SLOs has become more difficult. DevOps teams frequently lack a clear understanding of which performance indicators are most important to customers.
“If you’re not tracking the right things, you can’t make the right decisions about how to optimize your system,” Kroman said. “With New Relic’s SLI and SLO tools, teams can customize their dashboards to track the metrics that matter most to them and their customers.”
In contrast, New Relic is making it easier for DevOps teams to maintain service levels without having to spend extra money. For example, developers can use one click to generate service level indicators that automatically establish a baseline of expected performance and dependability. The platform also makes suggestions based on past performance to both create benchmarks and modify and customize SLIs and SLOs.
“New Relic’s SLI and SLO tools help DevOps teams focus on the things that matter most to their customers,” Kroman said. “By making it easy to track the right metrics and establish clear objectives, teams can improve their overall system performance and deliver better customer experiences.”
New Relic’s capabilities make it easier to establish service limits and track reliability across teams based on norms, tags, and reports that provide custom views for both service owners and business leaders. It is possible to use dashboards to get insight throughout an entire business process using an API provided by New Relic, according to Korman.
How does New Relic’s service level objective (SLO) capability work?
It’s still early days when it comes to the modernization of SLOs, but it’s clear that they will be managed as code in tandem with all other parts of a DevOps process over time. The more organizations rely on apps to drive digital business initiatives, the more important it becomes for DevOps teams to measure SLOs. It is critical to have the ability to set objectives and track progress toward those objectives over time.
Observability, of course, has always been a key tenet of DevOps. However, because most IT teams had previously monitored only a pre-defined set of metrics, few organizations have truly achieved it. Site reliability engineers (SREs) use modern observability platforms to launch queries against aggregated instances of metrics, logs, and distributed traces to determine the source of an issue. The problem then becomes correlating the findings of those queries with service levels that businesses demand from a set of applications that may be driving, for example, an order-to-cash process.
“New Relic’s SLI and SLO tools help DevOps teams focus on the things that matter most to their customers,” Kroman said. “By making it easy to track the right metrics and establish clear objectives, teams can improve their overall system performance and deliver better customer experiences.”
Kroman believes that as more organizations move to a cloud-native architecture, the need for New Relic’s SLI and SLO tools will become even more apparent. “Microservices are inherently distributed,” he said. “The ability to see how all of those services are working together and identify issues in real-time is essential to maintaining high levels of performance and customer satisfaction.”
By making it possible to track the right metrics and establish clear objectives, New Relic’s SLI and SLO tools can help DevOps teams improve their overall system performance and deliver better customer experiences.
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