Application Performance Monitoring 360 – Jemiah Sius, New Relic

This is Text Strong tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back to Text Strong tv.

com when we first published in March of 2014. We started November 13, so it's been almost going on 10 years now. Uh, one of the companies that we started covering kind of right off the bat back then was New Relic, new Re, you know, and over that time they've gone public and, you know, uh, application monitoring back then was not the application monitoring that we see today, that's for sure.

But we've been covering him ever since. And I'm happy to introduce a, a person from New Relic we've never had on before. I just found out.

He actually lives down in our neck of the woods here, down in Miami. I want to introduce you to, uh, Jamaya ss. Is that correct?

Yep, that's right, Alan. Fantastic. Jamiah, welcome to Techstrong tv.

It's a pleasure to have you on. Awesome. I'm excited to be here.

Hey everyone. Uh, thanks for having me. I'm glad I can join.

Uh, absolutely. So, Jamiah, you, you are head of developer relations, so Dev Rel over at New Relic. And, um, you know what, we obviously, we spend a, a good amount of time talking to Dev Re people, and I'm always curious to hear their journey, right?

How, cuz most of them were, you know, they're obviously started as developers, some were not great developers, and that's why they got into Dev Rel. But that's a whole nother story. Let, let's hear your journey a little bit.

Yeah, sure. Um, so like you said, I'm from Miami. I originally started out, um, as a creative, like doing design, things of that nature.

I taught myself how to code. Uh, so I wanted to make movies, fell in love with Shrek and was doing, uh, sprites and animation software I was using, had to C based language. And that kind of really got me, you know, into that and action script.

And then I started learning PHP and H L C css. I just developed this passion for, uh, developing and started to build a bunch of web applications, which, you know, originally caught, uh, caused the pivot. Uh, so I, you know, pivoted from marketing into being a software engineer, uh, starting off, uh, front end and then eventually going full stack, regularly coding and, uh, JavaScript, H O C S S on the front end, PHP on the back end.

Lots of people say things about why would you code in php, but, you know, it powered 80% of the web at one point. Yes, it did. Uh, you know, and so it was just, uh, a language that you had to work with if you, if you were doing, you know, uh, some web programming back then.

And then, uh, being down in Miami, just looking for a community, you know. Uh, so I started to, uh, search out for other engineers, ended up creating developer groups, going to meetups. And when I saw the role at New Relic, I've been here for about four and a half years ago.

Um, it, it wasn't titled as Dev Rel, but it was a role that mixed a lot of things that I was doing in the moment. It was, uh, software engineering, marketing, community development. It was coming into our product org as a developer advocate.

And I just thought it was perfect. It was like, it took all these things that I really had a passion for and enrolled it into, uh, one, one role within New Relic. And so, in my four and a half years I've been here working in this capacity in some way, like, uh, trying to understand the way that our customers are using the platform and how we can make that experience better.

Creating feedback loops internally, working on integrations with partners. And now with Dev Row, we're even looking at ways that we can better support our user communities, sponsoring events, doing talks, workshop, webinars, things of that nature. Um, and that's, that's the world that I live in.

I'm fortunate enough now to have a company that truly believes in our user community and wants to make sure that we're engaged and active. And so that's what me and my team does. I love it.

What a great, what a great story, man. You know, it's interesting. So you started in marketing Yep.

And your marketing journey led you into software development, which is kind of the opposite. A lot of developers, you know, wanna cross over onto the business side of the house and they come from development to, or marketing or product kind of role and, and, and go from there. You, you kind of swam against the tide, right?

Yeah. It's a reverse and it, it actually, But it's come full circle, Right? You know, like now I'm in our growth marketing org, um, which is interesting because I work on strategy, but also I still get to develop or kind of like get my hands on the keyboard.

So even a few weeks ago I was, um, took a few days to start building like an L L m I wanted to see what that was like to build for ai. And so it just allows me to kind of like keep those things going. And now when someone finds out that I can like open Photoshop and design a thing, they're like, what?

Like, you, like you do both. I'm like, well, you Do that too. Yeah.

Now. Exactly. You know, You know, it's funny you mentioned this about LLMs.

So even our CTO here, Mitchell Ashley, and a good friend of mine, John Willis, who works with us, who's pretty well known in DevOps, this, this L l m AI stuff has ignited them, right? They are, they are playing with all kinds of, you know, of uh, Python scripting and all kinds of tools, open source tools to grab data, throw it in a vector databases, and then, you know, run it against an a AI and stuff. And, you know, some of the stuff, they're actually, I'm meeting with them down here in Florida next week to, they're gonna show me some of the stuff they're doing with our own content.

Cuz I mean, the nice thing about here at Texturing is we're sitting on, I got 10 years, I probably have 25,000 DevOps articles, right? Oh, wow. Probably the biggest, you know, DevOps library.

Imagine throwing that into an L L M, right? Yeah. And, and, uh, doing that.

So yeah, it, I think a lot of, I think it, it's funny how computer and tech technologies work, Jamiah, you get something that gets the juices flowing like that and all of a sudden everybody, everybody's hacking again. Right? Exactly.

Everybody's out there doing their things, remembering their scripts, whatever it is. Good stuff. Um, so let's get to the news though.

Some new news coming outta New Relic. Yep, exactly. Uh, Why don't you share it?

Sure. Um, so on June 26th, we announced APM 360, right? But, uh, thinking about it, new Relic started, you know, years ago, our APM journey, really wanting to make sure that, uh, software engineers and operators had the data they needed to understand the performance of, um, the applications that we're developing.

And so we launched our, our first APM product, right? And then our journey has led us to go from having that one APM skew to, uh, being able to provide you insight on your entire stack, right? So everything from APM infrastructure, browser Kubernetes alerts, um, you know, new Relic Rock, which is a major announcements like over the years, we've always, you know, innovated and gone into new areas to make sure that New Relic became the, the leading full stack observability platform.

And then, so though we've expanded through all of these other segments of your tech stack, uh, we, you know, have APM at our core. And so with APM 360, we're fully aware that APM is a tool that software engineers or operators, um, rely on to make sure that they can provide a reliable system or understand the performance of, uh, their cloud architecture, microservice based systems, and in order to do their jobs, like having access to that data is, is truly important. Um, but with a traditional APM model, which, you know, we, we were in the past and a lot of other, um, um, a lot of other options are out there.

It, it creates a, a challenge of your data. Your data can be siloed. You have to deal with incidences when you're trying to triage an error without a lack of context because you're jumping screens, right?

Like you're trying to understand, uh, is it something that's going on on the application side, or is it the infrastructure? And so you're either jumping through screens, uh, some engineers are having to jump through different tools and figure out and, and just aren't able to maintain that context of, of, uh, what's going on with the system or the context of that data. And sometimes not even having access to the right data.

You know, I don't have access to, uh, this right tool or right feature. And APM 360 is eliminating all of that. Uh, now with APM 360, we're basically providing you a unified view of all of your telemetry data in one space.

So, uh, in New Relic apm, you'll be able to get insights of things like, of course, your application, uh, performance metrics, but as well as your infrastructure, your latest deployments, uh, with changes, uh, you'll be able to see any security or vulnerability issues that you may be having. And so, in the single pane of glass, you're keeping all this context, all this data's correlated, which is gonna help you reduce, you know, your meantime to detection and resolution and, uh, operate, you know, better software and time, uh, without needing to jump through multiple screens or without having that lack of context that engineers have experienced in the past. And that's gonna be the true power that, uh, APM 360 is providing.

Love it. Excellent man. Um, you know, it's interesting, 10 years ago it was all apm all the time at New Relic over the last couple years, of course, we've seen the whole APM space kind of evolve, right?

Observability is, is kind of the buzzword, you know, uh, a lot of places, even New Relic, I remember doing interviews, you know, talking about incorporating things like Open Telemetry and Prometheus and some of these big open source, you know, projects that are out there that allow us to get better insight in, you know, from monitoring and stuff. And, you know, observability impact on, on the whole APM space has been kind of profound. Um, but here we are back at APM 360, the way New Relic looks at that jamiah, how, like, are they one and the same is, are they different?

H if so, how, you know, how do you kind of reconcile all this? I, I think, uh, you're absolutely correct, right? It started with APM and then it, it, it expanded to all these other areas and various technologies, um, and, and creating the sense of observability, right?

It's not just the application. And I think that, that we all understand, it's because the way that we build software, it evolved over time. And, and you still had that same need for understanding, uh, the performance of that software or having visibility into what's going on.

And that's what, uh, for me, observability started to provide it. It was going, uh, into a space of not only understanding, uh, what's happening within your software stack, but why and how it's impacting your users. And, and for me, that's like the true meaning of observability.

That's the way that, that I think of it. Um, and I, and I feel like with a p m 360, we are, we're back at that space, right? So, uh, the way that we build software has changed.

We're using an array of languages and technologies within our stack, but it's all to provide one experience to our user, to our customer. And we need to understand how that, um, experience is, is we need to understand the performance and the reliability of that experience, what's happening and, and how it's impacting our customers. And I think with APM 360, that's our step in that direction of saying, we, we know that you're gonna be using all of these tools.

We know that you need to understand your application metrics. You also need to understand your distributed traces. Uh, just because the way that we architect software now is, uh, microservice based systems deployed into various cloud architectures in different regions, and sometimes in different, you know, uh, uh, providers.

You might have things deployed in aws, G C P and Azure, and we need to understand how they're communicating with each other as well as your external dependencies, right? So being able to have this view of your distributed system, uh, the performance of those applications at each step, uh, having insight into your logs and, and all these different, uh, uh, uh, things that you need to be aware of just because of how complex a system is, um, is what APM 360 is, is providing. And it's, it's, it's meant to match the state of kind of like software development or operating software these days, you know, the, the days of the, the monolith have gone for the most part.

Um, and so you just need a tool that's gonna be able to match that more complex system that's gonna give you full insight and allow someone to quickly go in and have a view of everything that's happening, uh, without needing to constantly switch screens. Agreed. Agreed.

Um, I'll tell, I'll tell you another thing. I, I've noticed when we first started looking at application performance monitoring, it was post-deployment, right? So in other words, I, I built my application, I deployed it, it's out there, and now I'm monitoring what the user experience is, what's going on, you know, how it's performing, et cetera.

But I think DevOps and the whole shift left and the way we think about things, we now, right? Application performance monitoring exists prior to deployment as well. As a matter of fact, it needs to be married to my testing.

I Agree at some level, right? So that as I'm testing this stuff pre-deployment, I'm monitoring that and, and feeding that in, and making my test be, you know, making my test scripts better perhaps, but also understanding more about how this thing's gonna work and what I can, you know, it's a lot easier to fix it on this side of that deployment bar than it is post-deployment a lot of, lot of times. And I think That's been a big thing.

Yeah, I hundred percent agree. And I, I feel that a lot of the industry is starting to, or, or a lot of, um, the, the conversation is starting to show that as well. A lot of people are talking about shifting left now, and understanding that you should be thinking about observability or application monitoring and security at every stage of that software development life cycle, that it's not good enough to deploy.

And then think about it once it's, uh, shipped out into production because you have an array of concerns at that point, and you're dealing with, uh, you know, issues and, and more errors at that stage. Whereas if you started to shift those concerns a bit earlier in the process, it's gonna allow you to be more efficient and have better testing and be able to find some things, um, before they hit production. That's just gonna provide your users with a better experience.

And, and we've made efforts in that area with things like Code Stream, right? Where you're able to see your, uh, observability data in your I d E as a developer. You can see the, uh, actual golden signals of the specific met, uh, methods that you're writing.

You can see your security issues within your I D E. It's allowing you to bring a lot of that data as you're actually building and testing, um, or our features like IAS that we just launched, that allows you to find those security issues before they ship out into production. So I think we, we truly understand that, you know, shifting left is gonna be a core part of, of, uh, the next stages of really providing reliable, uh, software.

And we're making our efforts in, in those areas to make sure that we can provide, uh, users with the tools they need to, to make that, that successful shift. Agreed. Matt Jamiah, we don't have a lot of time left, but I wanted to, for people out here who say, okay, you know, I'd like to take this for a test drive.

I want to get my fingers dirty. I want to, you know, see what it's about. Give us the kind of, what's the on-ramp here?

What should they do? Um, you're gonna go to New Relic, sign up for a free account. Uh, free account means free for life, no credit card needed, full user, full access to the platform.

And all you have to do is instrument an application. You're gonna instrument something, get that data flowing into New Relic, and there's no setup, nothing that's required. So as you start to use a platform, you'll see all of the parts of APM start to light up.

As you, as you in instrument logs. You're gonna get logs and context. Uh, as you get your tracing going, you're gonna see your traces on your APM services.

Um, so it's really easy to get started. Uh, you get to use it without any hassle. And, uh, I think people are gonna love it.

It really makes a, a difference in the way that you're able to now understand the performance of your applications when they're out in the world. Love it. Jamaya, I want to thank you for coming on here for your first time on Techstrong tv.

We hope it won't be your last time. Actually, we spoke, you're coming, gonna come up here to our, our studios and we'll film you in person next time. Exactly.

I look forward. Thank You for coming on. No, thank you so much.

Have a great day. Thank you. All right.

Aya Jamiah ss head of Developer Relations New Relic here on Textron tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a moment with more, so stay tuned.