New Relic Extends Analytics Reach to AWS

With cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services now becoming a more natural extension of IT environments there is a general push on to unify the management of on premise and cloud computing resources.

With that issue in mind, New Relic today announced at the AWS re:Invent conference that it is adding support for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to the New Relic Software Analytics Cloud.

Via the same console, Al Sargent, senior director of product marketing for New Relic, said organizations can now monitor applications, operating systems and now virtual cloud infrastructure running on EC2. While New Relic agent software can be deployed on any cloud, Sargent said the EC2 support from New Relic involves capturing data from the AWS CloudWatch monitoring service along with the metadata that New Relic gathers to provide more granular insights into the AWS cloud environment.

Not only can New Relic start monitoring instances of AWS in a matter of minutes, Sargent said New Relic Software Analytics Cloud makes it possible to group, filter, troubleshoot and drill into problem instances, across multiple AWS regions.

While there is no shortage of tools these days for managing specific cloud computing environments, IT solution providers are generally being asked to manage everything from on premise IT environments and the cloud. Rather than having to deploy and manage multiple tools, New Relic is making the case for using a cloud analytics service to unify the management of those IT environments.

In fact, Sargent noted that when it comes to both the cloud and modern IT environments running on premise most of the tools that IT solution providers and their customers currently rely on were originally designed for physical servers. For all intents and purposes, Sargent said those tools have now pretty much become antiquated. Instead of wasting capital investment dollars trying to build out another IT management stack, Sargent said New Relic is providing that IT management stack as a service that can be extended in multiple directions.

Sargent would not make any commitments just yet to extending New Relic to other clouds beyond AWS, where is so happens that New Relic itself is hosted. But as the number of clouds that IT organizations make use of continues to expand it only makes sense that New Relic will be tapping into any number of application programming interfaces (APIs) to collect data from anywhere an application happens to be running.