New Relic Infrastructure: Delivering Value and Efficiency to Your AWS Investment

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At New Relic, we believe “observability” is a critical part of infrastructure management, so we’re constantly working to make it easier for you to monitor your Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosts and services. Moreover, we understand that your foundational stack in AWS is likely evolving—management and configuration options for AWS offerings are more robust and dynamic than ever before—so our specific goal is make sure that you’re efficiently monitoring—and thus understanding—the impact those changes have on your software architecture and technology running in the cloud. To help illustrate that we’re all in on AWS, we want to highlight some of the latest capabilities from New Relic Infrastructure designed to help you get more value and efficiency out of your AWS investment.

Your AWS ecosystem is evolving

New Relic’s unique value becomes apparent the moment you incorporate our monitoring tools with your AWS services. But we offer even more value in a few critical areas based on your evolving workflows, including when:

You support multiple AWS accounts.
You run AWS across multiple regions.
You run multiple AWS services and need to understand how those services and their underlying hosts are performing.

Multi-account monitoring

It’s not uncommon for our customers to have different accounts in AWS based on organizational structures, security boundaries, or development-environment workflows. Each account generates its own metrics, perhaps even on a per-region basis, but teams may want to consolidate that multi-account data (for, say, SRE-driven cloud resource management ).

You can add multiple AWS accounts to New Relic Infrastructure. To do so, simply follow the steps to connect an AWS account for each account you want to associate with New Relic Infrastructure, and you’ll be able to consolidate your data in just one dashboard.

Multi-region support

As your Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) organization scales, multi-region support becomes even more critical. Large-scale SaaS operations are likely to distribute environments depending on regional, compliance, and high-availability needs. As you add customers throughout new regions, you need to monitor the entire infrastructure from a central location—that fabled “single pane of glass.” To this end, we’ve made it possible for you to connect AWS accounts from multiple regions to New Relic Infrastructure.

Multi-service monitoring

If you’re hosting an application on AWS infrastructure, you’re likely consuming more than one AWS service at a time. Maybe you have some combination of AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, AWS DynamoDB, and the AWS API Gateway working together in your application’s backend. For such architectures, New Relic Infrastructure provides more than 30 AWS integrations (more on them below) through which you can monitor essential AWS services from a single Infrastructure account.

When you connect multiple AWS integrations to your Infrastructure account, you’ll get one out-of-the-box dashboard that highlights the most relevant metrics for every service you’ve deployed—and you can correlate those metrics with application-level metrics.

As your integration footprint grows, consolidate it with one set of IAM credentials

AWS offers a wealth of services that allow easy access to core application requirements such as storage, networking, message queues, notifications, load balancing, and content distribution. This is a blessing in that no one wants to manage extra services. But it’s also a curse because you may have limited visibility into how the underlying hosts are performing.

New Relic Infrastructure aims to solve that problem by using the same identity and access management (IAM) credentials you provide in the initial setup of any AWS integration to pull in data about any AWS services running under your account. Our integrations collect essential metrics and events data, and data about configuration changes to your services, and let you audit the individual configurations.

These integrations are the cornerstone of our work to support your AWS journey.

Control when and how your integrations gather data

As we watch our customers use our AWS integrations, we’ve learned that while monitoring AWS services is a high priority, getting a focused view is equally important—as is avoiding significant increases in cloud-usage bills.

With that in mind, we’ve made it easy to take granular control over how you monitor your AWS cloud services. More specifically, the ability to configure polling frequency and data collection for cloud integrations is designed to let New Relic users:

Reduce the polling intervals for metrics and inventory.
Set filter s to narrow data fetching (for example, filter by region or by tag).

You can filter on any custom tags you’ve created on AWS resources to monitor your environment as you see fit. For example, you can filter by tags that define production or development environments, or even application type.

Fine tune polling frequency and filter data collection by AWS region.

Further, you can configure your polling frequency and filters to understand:

How often New Relic gathers service metrics from AWS.
How often New Relic gathers cloud entity and service attributes from AWS.
Which AWS-specific locations or resource groups New Relic will monitor.
Which tag keys or tag values describe the AWS resources New Relic will monitor.
The names of the resources (such as AWS queues and application load balancers) that New Relic will monitor.

By fine tuning your polling frequency and setting filters on data collection, you can prevent potentially excessive API polling and avoid usage rate limits that incur additional service charges.

See our cloud polling documentation for more details.

Of course, cost savings are essential

As AWS partners, we’re dedicated to providing the best experience for our mutual customers, while understanding that cost controls are essential. Which is why earlier this year we partnered with AWS on the AWS getMetricData API, which bundles hundreds of metrics into a single request and significantly decreases the number of call requests made to AWS CloudWatch.

The getMetricData API helps customers using our AWS Infrastructure integrations by providing a more scalable and cost-effective solution. It’s led to fewer API requests to our users’ accounts, and faster resolution of their AWS environment-related issues and degradations.

This example chart shows a 75% decrease in API calls after implementing the AWS GetMetricData API.

We’ve got you covered

When you adopt AWS, we want you to do so with confidence—enjoying out-of-the-box visibility into the services you use. In the last year, we’ve released multi-account, multi-region, and multi-service monitoring capabilities for our 30+ AWS integrations, allowing you to control your cloud infrastructure on your terms.

With polling data and API request enhancements, we’ve made it possible for you to optimize your cloud spend by identifying inefficient resource usage, freeing budget resources for further AWS investment.

These capabilities just the tip of the iceberg—be sure to check out all of our other AWS integrations, including Amazon Elastic Container Servi c e for Kubernetes (EKS) and AWS Billing and Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS). No matter what size investment you’re making into AWS, our goal is to help you maximize your return.

Planning to be at AWS re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas? Be sure to visit both our locations in the Venetian (1220) and the Aria (Q200) for informative lightning talks featuring technical deep dives with New Relic experts and partners, as well as real-world customer stories. We’ll have plenty of information and ideas on how New Relic can help you optimize your AWS journey.