How New Relic supports cloud migration, operations, and maintenance

This article highlights a real-world migration example from a Chaos Gears client in the entertainment industry. Located in the US and in over 50 other locations globally, the company decided to deploy New Relic on the cloud that included integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) services, Kubernetes, and third-party applications including Cassandra and NGINX. The entertainment company used a hybrid cloud model to meet key business results and implemented a management tool to support the migration process. As part of the solution, a key requirement was to monitor migration processes and alert operators to any anomalies.

The first stage of our project was to prepare a fully functioning Landing Zone in the company's AWS Organization and migrate part of the business to that Organization. We achieved this using a team of experienced engineers dedicated to working with the client.

As a reliable and fast-growing AWS partner in Europe, Chaos Gears helped the client to maximize the potential of its cloud and to choose the most appropriate tool to simplify migration to the cloud. We delegated a highly experienced team of engineers to this project, who know the benefits and possibilities of public cloud computing and understand the traditional IT environment and processes within large organizations.

The project decision-makers on the client’s side together with the Chaos’ engineers selected the New Relic platform for the migration process. The tool supports the entire cloud lifecycle from pre-migration planning through ongoing optimization, including: 

• Pilot and foundation, planning your blueprint for cloud success based on sound principles.
• Migration assurance, avoid typical mistakes through thorough planning, troubleshooting and validation after each step.
• Optimization, develop an environment that’s the right size for performance needs and speed requirements. 
• Application modernization, using the latest and most efficient technologies and processes
• Create a thriving digital business with measurable business results and KPIs to ensure success. 

Why New Relic - the engineers’ observations

Based on feedback from engineers working on the project, the platform provided a range of key benefits, which resulted in their client’s decision to use New Relic for day-to-day operations and maintenance work post-migration, making it the observability and monitoring standard for the company. 

Engineers from Chaos and from the client side identified key benefits New Relic delivers:

• Unified monitoring and alerting system for all environments in one place, regardless of location - AWS US regions or on-site locations in Europe.
• Proper right-sizing of cloud instances. With the use of dashboards we were able to make a sensible decision about defining the usage baseline of our workloads (based on the usage of CPU/Memory/Network for each type of workload). That helped to make decisions about moving the workload to the cloud where applications perform equally or even better than on-premises.
• Synthetic tests and monitoring helped with the configuration of production environments. With the help of scripted synthetic tests, it was easy to ensure that freshly migrated applications were up and running. 
• Using those same scripts allowed Chaos Gears to speed up the migration process and eliminate manual tests that had been used to ensure that the site was working as expected. 
• The customer’s apps are instrumented with New Relic APM allowing engineers to quickly find and investigate errors, traces, and to measure latency. 
• New Relic dashboards provide essential visibility into site reliability engineering (SRE) work, also providing easy comparison between on-premises and cloud workloads. 
• Alerts for business-critical applications make it easy for SRE engineers to identify and resolve a problem in client systems. 
• The customer was able to offload the workload for configuration and maintenance for monitoring tools to New Relic itself.
• The customer found that there were no limits to how many applications, pods, instances, or other cloud resources they used because New Relic automatically integrates, monitors, and alerts for any new resource in the cloud.

Overall benefits of using New Relic allowed the business to focus on creating applications that deliver growth and new capabilities, without constant troubleshooting. 

Benefits of using New Relic

As businesses and development teams move to the cloud, there are a growing number of services and solutions to support their efforts. A good example is New Relic delivers improved observability and problem-solving providing DevOps teams with a highly automated way to monitor and debug across the entire development stack for cloud migrations. 

Advantages include a unified monitoring platform, regardless of what tools and applications are on your stack. The alerting system works across all Amazon Cloud environments as well as your local services.

New Relic provides engineers using AWS with insights up-and-down the technology stack, including MongoDB, nodeJS, Apache, and MySQL among others. With instant insights into the system, it provides usage, error, and VM metrics, monitors latency between applications and website uptime. 

New Relic observability platform snapshot

If you are new to New Relic, we thought we would provide you this brief overview of the platform. The tool ensures great set of capabilities, but you only need to choose the elements you need, from a broad list: 

• AIOps: Alerts & AI
• Application Monitoring (APM) 
• Browser Monitoring 
• CodeStream: Debug in IDE NewML Model Monitoring NewLog Management
  
• Error Tracking 
• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Network Monitoring (NPM) 
• Pixie: K8s Monitoring 
• Synthetics Monitoring 

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As companies look to leverage the benefits of cloud migration,tools like New Relic help manage the complexities involved. Providing health maps and application performance monitoring, it allows businesses to deliver value, optimize operations, and innovate faster,all of which improve the user and customer experience, regardless of the application. 

Cloud adoption and usage will only continue to grow, and teams are pressed to deliver more complex solutions with many moving parts. New Relic eases integrations and delivery, reducing the workload on developers and engineers.

As the volume of code, the toolset used to manage it, and the complexity of development increases, all DevOps teams need a support tool to help with delivery and operations management across the highly dynamic environment. Additionally it is critical to monitor the end-user’s experience on the live applications. 

Get in touch to see how Chaos Gears and New Relic can improve your IT performance.