New Relic Explorer Gives Full-Stack Developers a Bird's-Eye View

New Relic gave its application performance monitoring (APM) platform a fresh coat of paint with the launch of its Explorer dashboard. New Relic gave its application performance monitoring (APM) platform a fresh coat of paint with the launch of its Explorer dashboard. Explorer reimagines the idea of a single-pane of glass interface for application monitoring, explained Buddy Brewer, field CTO for New Relic Americas. “Explorer is meant to be the new front door into New Relic One,” he said. “It’s your mission control.” The update is part of an ongoing push by the vendor to address the needs of full-stack developers. New Relic One ties together all the monitoring tools in the company’s arsenal into a single package aimed at developers who are responsible for everything from the frontend to the underlying infrastructure. “There is this increasing amount of pressure for people to quickly understand at a glance the application health, irrespective of what layer on which things may or may not be happening,” Brewer said. The problem is, until now, each of these monitoring tools has had its own distinct interface, making it difficult to correlate data from one tool to another. But, Explorer is more than a dashboard for New Relic’s monitoring suite as it also takes advantage of machine learning algorithms to surface insights on application health. Rather than packing a page to the gills with line charts and metrics, Explorer simplifies this by providing customers with a bird’s-eye view of their workloads based on how they’re performing, and whether they are behaving as expected. This, Brewer said, takes much of the effort out of determining whether a workload is operating within normal parameters. Brewer explained that because cloud-native workloads are designed to failover, it isn’t as simple as looking at error rates. Instead, Explorer visualizes key metrics over time to pinpoint anomalous behavior and identify where in the stack the issue originated. For example, if customers are experiencing a spike in latency on the frontend, the developer would be able to see if there was a corresponding increase in the number of errors elsewhere in the application stack, Brewer said. New Relic claims Explorer will dramatically reduce the time to root cause, allow customers to scale more proactively to rapid changes in traffic or user behavior, and meaningfully test their platforms through methods like chaos engineering. The update will be available for free to all existing New Relic customers.