New Relic brings business context to its observability platform

New Relic today announced the availability of Pathpoint, an open-source add-on to its observability platform that provides business and technical visibility and context into how infrastructure components and applications are performing to support digital services.  

The company introduced New Relic Pathpoint as an additional tool for its cloud-based observability platform, which monitors applications and services in real time to provide insights into software, hardware, and cloud performance. Pathpoint aims to bridge the gap between business and technical teams by providing business-centric analysis of how technology components are performing.

“Technical teams typically operate with technical metrics on how well the software they build is working, lacking the insight into the digital business process powered by their software. Business teams typically operate with business metrics on how well the digital business process is working, lacking insight into the performance of the underlying software,” says Manav Khurana, chief product officer at New Relic.

This creates a gap that can cause friction across teams trying to align on common goals, according to Khurana. It can also cause performance problems when technical changes negatively impact business processes due to a lack of insight. If technology stakeholders are unaware of how their changes impact business processes, that can lead to performance degradation and even downtime, according to New Relic.

“New Relic Pathpoint bridges this gap by creating a single source of truth to monitor a digital business process with both business and technical metrics in one place,” Khurana says.

Research shows that software disruptions and outages hurt the bottom line when businesses lose revenue. According to New Relic’s most recent Observability Forecast, “21% of organizations reported that critical business app outages cost at least $1 million per hour of downtime, and the majority of organizations (60%) take more than 30 minutes to resolve high business-impact outages.”

Pathpoint can be installed directly into the New Relic platform. By identifying relationships between “activity and availability” in a business processes, Pathpoint can translate telemetry metrics into operational insights, and the software will alert both technical and business teams if there is an unwanted change in the business metrics.

As business services continue to grow more complex, IT professionals recognize the need to correlate technical events directly to business outcomes. Tools such as New Relic Pathpoint can not only identify performance problems across an environment but also help drive greater collaboration among business and technical teams.

“Increasing collaboration across teams, New Relic Pathpoint enables our engineering team with the technical insights needed to pinpoint and resolve issues faster. It provides our management and executive teams with the business-level insights needed to make more informed decisions based on specific KPIs and custom metrics, like tracking booking volume over a certain period of time or monitoring and analyzing search performance during peak hours,” said Sangeetha Niranjan, site reliability engineer with Trainline, in a statement. “This helps our entire organization, from the top down, work together to ensure our customers have the best experience possible at every stage—searching, booking, payment, and fulfillment—when finding and buying train tickets.”

Pathpoint is available now as a New Relic open-source project and distributed under the Apache 2 license and can be installed directly into the New Relic platform.