Developers and DevOps teams love to create customized methods for retrieving the data they need to help a company work more efficiently. Many prefer using a command line interface that allows them the kind of access they need as opposed to a user interface that might not show all of the data they want to see.
New Relic has noticed a shift in their customers to more autonomous teams and DevOps. With that shift, the cloud-scale monitoring company also noticed many customers want their New Relic ‘user experience’ to be a command line interface, SDK or API in addition to customized dashboards and products, the firm asserts. That approach allows customers to use New Relic alongside other platforms and tools.
New Relic Developer Program
To help facilitate that shift, New Relic recently launched a developer program, which comes one year after a partner program launch. The developer program is designed to help customers do more with their application and infrastructure data, improve their ability to get data in and out of New Relic and automate New Relic into their workflows.
"Our developer program aims to address our community’s needs by providing code, documentation, examples, and tutorials so that engineers can more easily automate the creation of dashboards and alerts, extend New Relic with custom metrics, events and tracing data, and build on New Relic as an open, programmable platform," said Aaron Johnson, senior vice president, product management at New Relic in a prepared statement.
According to the company, the new developer program features:
- A guide for discovering New Relic’s APIs, SDKs, repos, and additional resources to support developers.
- New ways to access cloud integration and New Relic Query Language (NRQL) data—leveraging the New Relic GraphQL API—which gives customers a single request method to manage and retrieve data in and out of New Relic.
- The release of a New Relic APM language agent for Elixir under an open source license. Elixir is an emerging language for building scalable, efficient applications.
The company is building this program around three main functions:
- Extend: NewRelic is promoting the developer program as a great way to extend the capabilities of the data you receive from its products. With the New Relic Query Language, partners can create custom dashboards and alerts, perform advanced analytics and debugging, and extend monitoring and analysis in new directions, the company says.
- Customize: According to the company, custom attributes allows customers and partners to create workflows or manipulate the data for deeper analysis.
- Automate: New Relic integrates with config management tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. That allows customers and partners to manage the New Relic's installation on thousands of host computers, the company says. Partners and customers can also manage hundreds of alerts, dashboards, Synthetic monitors, cloud integrations, and more resources through the New Relic APIs, including basic CRUD operations. When a system goes down and the alerts start flooding in, you can use webhooks to automate your issue response and remediation services, the company says.
The developer program seeks to provide DevOps with a forum for discovering, collaborating, and building on top of the New Relic platform.
Cloud-Scale Monitoring Momentum
New Relic has been gaining momentum as a platform for infrastructure, mobile, web and application application performance monitoring (APM). The company competes with a lengthy list of APM and cloud monitoring tools and revenues are growing rapidly.
For its first quarter of fiscal 2019 (which ended June 30, 2018), New Relic's revenue was $108.2 million -- up 35 percent from the corresponding quarter last year.
