In this blog, we’ll discuss how your AWS resources can be monitored using a comprehensive monitoring and observability platform to improve application performance, optimize infrastructure usage, and enhance the overall user experience. By leveraging New Relic’s suite of tools, you can gain deep insights into your system’s behavior, quickly identify and resolve issues, and make data-driven decisions for future enhancements. The primary objective of selecting New Relic as a monitoring platform is to ensure optimal cloud infrastructure performance and resource utilization. It aims to enhance application speed and reliability by identifying and resolving bottlenecks. The platform facilitates streamlined troubleshooting by aggregating and analyzing logs from AWS ECS, Amazon CloudWatch, and other services. Additionally, it enables proactive alerting to notify teams of anomalies and critical incidents while offering insights into user behavior to improve real user experience.

Leveraging AWS and Its Limitations

While AWS Monitoring tools provide infrastructure monitoring, they fall short in several key areas crucial for smooth application performance:

1. Limited Visibility: AWS CloudWatch primarily focuses on infrastructure metrics, lacking detailed application performance insights such as distributed tracing and code-level troubleshooting.
2. Siloed Data: Correlating application behavior with underlying infrastructure metrics from CloudWatch can be challenging due to siloed data storage.
3. Alert Fatigue: CloudWatch’s generic alerts can lead to alert fatigue, potentially causing critical issues to be missed.
4. Limited User Experience (UX) Insights: Understanding how real users experience applications on AWS is difficult with CloudWatch alone.

Key Features of New Relic

While AWS Monitoring tools provide infrastructure monitoring, they fall short in several key areas crucial for smooth application performance:

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

New Relic’s APM provides comprehensive insights into application performance:

• Detailed Metrics: Monitoring response times, throughput, error rates, and Apdex scores.
• Transaction Tracing: Tracing individual transactions to identify bottlenecks.
• Error Analysis: Automatic capture and analysis of errors for quick resolution.
• Database Monitoring: Monitoring database performance and query execution times.
• Service Maps: Visualizing service dependencies and interactions in real-time.

1. Infrastructure Monitoring
   
   New Relic Infrastructure offers real-time monitoring for servers and cloud environments:
   • Resource Utilization: Tracking CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network usage.
   • AWS Integration: Monitoring AWS services like EC2, RDS, S3, and Lambda.
   • Health Metrics: Providing health metrics and alerts for uptime and performance.
   • Configuration Management: Tracking configuration changes and their performance impact.
   • Cluster Monitoring: Monitoring containerized environments like Kubernetes and Docker.
2. Browser Monitoring / Real User Monitoring (RUM)
   
   Tracks user interactions with your application in real-time:
   • Performance Metrics: Measuring page load times and user interaction timings.
   • User Sessions: Analyzing user behavior patterns and performance issues.
   • Geographical Insights: Identifying performance variations across locations.
   • Browser Performance: Tracking across browsers and devices.
   • Session Traces: Drilling into individual sessions to identify issues.
3. Synthetic Monitoring
   
   Simulates user transactions to proactively identify performance issues:
   • Scripted Browsers: Creating synthetic scripts for user interactions.
   • Global Testing: Testing from multiple geographic locations.
   • Performance Benchmarks: Benchmarking against predefined SLAs.
   • Alerting: Alerting on performance deviations and downtime.
   • Uptime Monitoring: Ensuring application availability with regular checks.
4. Logs Management
   
   Aggregates and analyzes log data for troubleshooting and optimization:
   • Log Aggregation: Collecting logs from applications and infrastructure.
   • Search and Query: Performing advanced searches on log data.
   • Real-time Streaming: Streaming log data for immediate insights.
   • Correlation: Correlating logs with performance metrics for holistic analysis.
   • Alerting: Setting alerts for specific log patterns or anomalies.
5. Dashboards and Alerts
   
   Customizable dashboards and alerting systems to monitor metrics and notify teams:
   • Custom Dashboards: Visualizing key metrics and KPIs.
   • Pre-built Dashboards: Utilizing pre-built dashboards for common use cases.
   • Alerting Policies: Defining alert policies for critical metrics.
   • Notification Channels: Integrating with email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.
   • Incident Management: Tracking incidents and resolutions.
6. Distributed Tracing
   
   Visualizes request flows across services to pinpoint failures:
   • Trace Requests: Tracing the journey of requests through services.
   • Latency Analysis: Identifying latency at each hop.
   • Service Maps: Visualizing service interactions and dependencies.
   • Error Tracking: Tracking errors across distributed services.
   • Trace Sampling: Managing trace data volume through adaptive sampling.
7. Mobile Monitoring
   
   Provides insights into mobile application performance:
   • Crash Reporting: Automatic capture of application crashes.
   • Performance Metrics: Monitoring app launch times and network requests.
   • User Interaction Traces: Tracing interactions and their impact on performance.
   • Device Insights: Analyzing performance across devices and OS versions.
8. Serverless Monitoring
   
   Tracks serverless function performance and usage:
   • AWS Lambda Integration: Monitoring Lambda functions with real-time metrics.
   • Function Tracing: Tracing invocations and dependencies.
   • Cost Monitoring: Tracking execution costs and usage.
   • Cold Start Analysis: Identifying cold start issues.
   • Event Tracking: Monitoring events triggering functions.

How You Can Adopt

Phase 1: Initial Assessment

Identify critical applications and infrastructure components that require monitoring and define performance metrics. This phase involves conducting a thorough assessment to identify critical applications and AWS infrastructure components that require monitoring. Stakeholders will collaborate to define performance metrics and proactive alerting thresholds aligned with business objectives. Leveraging New Relic’s pre-built integrations for AWS services like ECS, Lambda, and RDS aims to streamline integration and enhance visibility into system performance.

Phase 2: Configuration and Integration

Set up New Relic accounts, deploy monitoring agents, and integrate with AWS CloudWatch logs. During this phase, the focus is on setting up New Relic accounts tailored to organizational structure and operational needs. Configuration of monitoring agents across applications and infrastructure will ensure comprehensive data collection. Deployment of browser and synthetic monitoring capabilities will provide real-time insights into user interactions and simulate user journeys for proactive issue detection. Integration with AWS CloudWatch logs will centralize log management for efficient troubleshooting and incident response.

Phase 3: Dashboard and Alert Setup

Develop customized dashboards and set up alerting policies based on predefined thresholds. Customized dashboards within New Relic will be developed in this phase to visualize key metrics and KPIs essential for monitoring application performance, infrastructure health, and user experience. These dashboards will facilitate informed decision-making and enhance operational transparency. Setting up alerting policies based on predefined thresholds will ensure timely notifications via email, Slack, or PagerDuty, enabling swift responses to performance anomalies and security incidents.

Phase 4: Continuous Monitoring and Optimization

Analyze performance data, refine dashboards, and enhance operational efficiency over time. The final phase focuses on establishing a cycle of continuous improvement by analyzing application performance data to identify optimization opportunities. Refinement of dashboards and alerting mechanisms based on usage patterns and feedback will maintain relevance and effectiveness. The goal is to leverage New Relic’s insights to enhance application performance, optimize resource utilization, and strengthen overall operational efficiency over time.

Benefits

1. Unified View: New Relic eliminates the need for context switching between CloudWatch and separate APM tools by providing a unified view of application performance and infrastructure metrics. This integration simplifies monitoring workflows, enhances efficiency, and facilitates quick correlation of data across different layers of your infrastructure. Improved collaboration among teams further enhances operational effectiveness.
2. Increased Application Performance: New Relic’s advanced APM capabilities, including distributed tracing and code-level profiling, swiftly identify performance bottlenecks that impact application responsiveness. By analyzing detailed metrics and transaction traces, teams can efficiently resolve issues and proactively prevent regressions with synthetic monitoring. This proactive approach ensures a seamless user experience during deployments and under varying workloads.
3. Reduced Downtime: With New Relic’s customizable alerting system and real-time monitoring capabilities, teams receive early warnings about critical metrics and infrastructure health. This proactive monitoring enables prompt mitigation of potential issues before they escalate into outages, ensuring uninterrupted business operations. Enhanced visibility into infrastructure health and centralized log management further accelerates incident resolution, minimizing downtime impact.
4. Optimized Resource Usage: New Relic provides granular insights into resource consumption across AWS environments, facilitating informed decisions on resource optimization. By identifying and addressing resource bottlenecks, teams optimize infrastructure efficiency and implement cost-saving strategies like AWS Reserved Instances or Auto Scaling. This approach maximizes the value of AWS investments while maintaining optimal performance.
5. Enhanced User Satisfaction: Improves user experience through RUM insights. Proactively resolving application performance issues with New Relic enhances user experience by ensuring faster response times and improved reliability. Real User Monitoring (RUM) insights into user interactions empower teams to prioritize enhancements that directly impact user satisfaction and retention. Data-driven decisions based on user behavior analytics further optimize user experience, fostering loyalty and engagement.
6. Proactive Issue Resolution: Customizable alerts for critical performance issues. New Relic’s early anomaly detection and comprehensive visibility into application performance enable proactive issue resolution. Customizable alerts notify teams of critical performance issues or potential security threats, enabling swift action to mitigate risks and minimize downtime. Streamlined troubleshooting with centralized log management and distributed tracing ensures quicker identification and resolution of root causes, improving overall incident management efficiency.

Conclusion

Integrating New Relic with AWS enhances monitoring by addressing CloudWatch’s limitations, providing deep insights into application performance, and improving user satisfaction with proactive issue resolution. Start for free today and unlock better observability.