Supercharging the AWS Environment with Kinect and New Relic

After businesses move to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a common next step is to expand visibility into their infrastructures. But without examining sufficient telemetry in a broader business context, companies may not see all their pain points. Kinect Consulting helps businesses get more value from AWS environments using the New Relic cloud-based observability platform and connecting robust performance data to their bottom lines. This helps customers gain a better view across their stacks and pinpoint bottlenecks to inform operational improvement—maximizing the benefits of AWS, boosting productivity, and optimizing the customer experience.

Once companies have migrated, they tend to add a long list of supplemental tools to their AWS environments, creating complex infrastructures. It can then be a challenge to find, diagnose, and resolve performance issues. The result is an overload of siloed visibility tools that prevent businesses from understanding which resources are over- and underutilized—driving up costs, hindering productivity, and detracting from the customer experience.

To solve this, global firm Kinect Consulting helps customers implement and mature their AWS environments in a way that accelerates the value they see from AWS. With AWS as its primary strategic cloud partner, Kinect assesses current states and creates customized roadmaps that improve businesses’ security, agility, and reliability.

A cornerstone of Kinect's strategy is provisioning comprehensive observability of AWS environments. To that end, Kinect chose the New Relic cloud-native, end-to-end monitoring and observability platform. An AWS Partner since 2012, Kinect felt that “New Relic would give us the best capabilities in ensuring the performance of technical assets,” said Kevin Mead, vice president of business development at Kinect Consulting.

“We create observability across every part of the stack, the network, the infrastructure, and devices,” said Jesse Clem, vice president of alliances and channels for the Americas at New Relic. “One of the many benefits that New Relic customers see is as much as an 88% reduction in unplanned downtime.”

Using data from New Relic's robust telemetry, Kinect connects infrastructure performance to company initiatives and suggests technological improvements that can result in business outcomes. In the case of re-architectures, Kinect explains, at an executive level, how technological changes will impact the bottom line—from improving the customer experience to reducing infrastructure spend. For migrations to the cloud, this approach measures aspects such as application performance before the shift, addressing refactoring needs beforehand, and preventing downtime.

When a large media company wanted to improve its monitoring system—and ultimately, the customer experience—it brought in Kinect. Working with New Relic, Kinect was able to track user flows across the company’s apps and see where the bottlenecks were, allowing them to improve the accuracy of the alerts. In the first few months of engagement, the company saw zero false positives. The changes Kinect and New Relic enabled led to a reduction in incident reassignment to other teams, and over the next year, the company saw a 77% reduction in priority changes across monitoring opened incidents. In addition to reducing operational costs, facilitating better alert prioritization, and eliminating troubleshooting burnout, it allowed the teams to focus on the most important customer-impacting issues.

In another project that involved moving a large pharmaceutical client to AWS, Kinect was able to migrate the company’s legacy tooling and platform used by 90 different technology teams onto New Relic. Kinect was able to successfully shift the company’s 24/7 operations center, all its infrastructure and application teams, and technology systems because of the criticality of the systems into which New Relic provides visibility—optimizing how the customer was managing Kubernetes environment in AWS.

“So many of these big companies are now getting a level of visibility they’ve never had before, and they are seeing the advantages,” said Jonathan Love, practice leader for monitoring and observability at Kinect Consulting.

Cloud adopters are often unaware of just how much visibility they need throughout their infrastructures. So, they acquire different monitoring, logging, and other tools reactively while modernizing and updating their infrastructure. As a result, they find themselves in the jaws of "tool sprawl," a collection of siloed solutions that lead to visibility gaps and redundant spending.

Kinect remedied such a situation with a global software company. In the customer’s migration to AWS, Kinect discovered that different teams were using different tools, creating siloed data. In a massive tool consolidation program, Kinect converted the $2.3 million the customer was spending across 15 tools to a centralized monitoring and observability platform using only three tools with New Relic. Now, all teams see the same data dashboard on the same platform, catching issues such as over-deployed instances sooner, across departments—saving them time, money, and effort.

“The visibility that New Relic provides, along with Kinect’s expertise in extracting insights, turns into actual dollars,” Mead said.

Those savings are layered on top of the productivity gains businesses see from the reduced mean time to detection (MTTD) and resolution (MTTR) that New Relic offers.

“We are able to consistently achieve anywhere from a five- to 10-minute MTTD across large enterprises and dozens of teams, lowering time to triage and MTTR across the board,” Love said.

Instead of the traditional single-layer approach, Kinect uses New Relic to enable business-level monitoring from the back-to the front-end, helping customers monitor the speed and velocity of coding and debugging. With this data, companies can accelerate development and the diagnosis of production issues—with less guesswork. The artificial intelligence baked throughout the New Relic platform adds automation to issue detection—at scale—before customers or partners complain.

“Our approach drives engineer-level productivity across any team that is responsible for digital services running on AWS, and it's safe to expect a 10 to 20% annual increase in productivity,” Love said. 

The benefits don’t stop with impactful re-architecture or migration. As AWS continues to unveil and evolve services, Kinect and New Relic plan to leverage their status as experienced AWS Partners to help customers implement modernization that makes the most business impact.

“We are excited to take the power of AWS and multiply it,” Mead said. “With New Relic, we're really taking the value that AWS provides to another level.”