Delivering Real-Time Insights to Enterprise Customers – New Relic, an AWS Migration Competency Partner

We launched the AWS Migration Competency in June 2016 with one simple goal in mind: to help customers connect with AWS Partners who’ve proven their expertise helping customers of all sizes successfully migrate to AWS. The principle of simplicity has driven the launch of all of our Competencies. Our mission is to make it as easy as possible for customers to find AWS Partners who’ve demonstrated deep expertise in particular solution areas, and we plan to continue to launch Competencies in different areas to reach more use cases on AWS.

New Relic is an Advanced APN Technology Partner who holds the AWS DevOps, AWS Mobile, and AWS Migration Competencies, with particular focus on application testing and monitoring. New Relic offers solutions that provide real-time end-to-end intelligence across customer experiences, application performance, and dynamic infrastructure. As an Advanced APN Partner, the company has built a mature AWS-based business, and has helped a wide range of Enterprise customers successfully take advantage of the benefits of AWS, including Airbnb, GE, Healthcare.gov, Fairfax Media, FlightStats, MLBAM, and News Corp. NewRelic continues to innovate on AWS, and has recently expanded its solutions portfolio to include New Relic Infrastructure, an infrastructure monitoring solution on AWS. Learn more at www.newrelic.com/infrastructure

We recently caught up with the New Relic team to learn a little more about what makes them unique as an ISV, how they work with AWS, the migration trends the team is seeing within its customer base, and what’s next for the company on AWS.

Who is New Relic?

New Relic is a leading digital intelligence company that delivers full-stack visibility and analytics to more than 14,000 customers, including more than 40 percent of the Fortune 100. “Our customers include digital-first companies like AirBnB, as well as large enterprises looking to transform for digital era, including GE and MLB Advanced Media,” says John Gray, SVP of Business Development at New Relic. “New Relic helps organizations understand if their apps are up and running, how to improve their digital customer experience, and realize the promise of their digital investments.”

As an Advanced Technology Partner, New Relic works closely with AWS to ensure the performance and success of customers’ applications and infrastructure utilizing AWS services.

Why AWS?

With a deep focus on end customers and their wide range of use cases, New Relic saw the potential to build solutions for customers on AWS. “With a large customer base building cloud-native applications, New Relic recognized the market opportunity to align with companies shifting to cloud usage. AWS provides a flexible and highly scalable solution that allows us to build high availability, highly scalable services in a very timely manner. As a result, it made sense to offer an application and infrastructure performance monitoring solution on AWS,” explains Lee Atchison, Principal Cloud Architect at New Relic. “We use AWS to develop our applications, and deploy highly scalable production services.”

Innovating on AWS

A pure, multi-tenant SaaS platform, the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform provides visibility into how customers make use of cloud-based services, such as AWS, from within the application and infrastructure running on AWS services. New Relic also provides active monitoring of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) servers to provide infrastructure-level monitoring and configuration management. “We offer companies the ability to increase their understanding of the behaviors of the AWS services they use, code running on AWS services, trends in digital experiences, and the business outcomes of those experiences,” says Atchison. With the recent addition of New Relic Infrastructure, it includes out of the box integrations to provide expanded native monitoring with popular AWS Services such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon RDS, AWS Elastic Load Balancing, and more.

As the company continued to build and grow on AWS, New Relic chose to become an APN Partner to demonstrate its strong relationship with AWS to both current and prospective customers.

Customer Migrations to AWS

By helping customers identify, benchmark, and troubleshoot application performance through New Relic Application Performance Monitoring (New Relic APM), New Relic has helped a number of customers successfully migrate to AWS. Fairfax Media, a leading media company in Australia and New Zealand, used New Relic on their on-premises systems while migrating to AWS, and were able to identify potential application issues and fix them before the migration. Dedalus, a Premier AWS Consulting Partner and Systems Integrator, has used New Relic to extend monitoring beyond infrastructure to the application layer, and monitor application queries and health for over 100 of its customers. “Through New Relic APM and New Relic Infrastructure, we’re able to provide customers a seamless diagnostics experience with full stack visibility for their applications running on Amazon EC2,” says Atchison.

For customers about to undergo a large-scale cloud migration, the New Relic team recommends investing in both infrastructure and application-layer performance monitoring. “Monitoring your cloud infrastructure is important, so you don’t find yourself over-provisioned, or under-provisioned in a critical area,” explains Atchison. “However, monitoring infrastructure shouldn’t be the only avenue to monitor your performance. A single query from an application can be the true cause of why your infrastructure isn’t performing as you’d expect. Monitoring performance at the application level to catch these irregularities is also critical.”

New Relic was a launch partner for the AWS Migration Competency, and believes the Competency helps customers understand the company’s level of expertise within the space. “We believe the AWS Migration Competency assures customers and prospects that New Relic has a deep understanding of the migration process to AWS,” says John Gray, SVP of Business Development.

What’s Next?

With the recent launch of New Relic Infrastructure, which is now offered on AWS Marketplace through AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions, the company is looking beyond its expertise in the application performance monitoring space to provide customers the ability to have an end-to-end view of their environment on AWS. “New Relic Infrastructure provides customer with easy dynamic instance monitoring, and the ability to efficiently understand their EC2 usage and optimize usage and cost,” explains Gray.

As an APN Partner, New Relic is working with AWS to explore new marketing opportunities such as videos, shared customer speaking experiences at AWS and New Relic events, workshops, and more. As previously mentioned, New Relic recently listed New Relic Infrastructure on AWS Marketplace and is looking to expand products available on AWS Marketplace.

Lee Atchison, Principal Cloud Architect at New Relic, held two speaking sessions at AWS re:Invent 2016. Check them out:

To learn more about New Relic, visit the company’s listing in the AWS Partner Finder.