This article is based on a New Relic press release originally published in March 2017. Customer quotes and product feature descriptions reflect conditions at that time.
The Business Case for Measuring DevOps Performance
Organizations of all sizes are adopting DevOps methodologies to ship software faster, reduce defects, and resolve production problems more quickly. But velocity without visibility is dangerous. Without a clear, shared view of how every code change affects system performance and customer experience, development and operations teams are flying blind.
New Relic, Inc. (NYSE: NEWR) positioned its Digital Intelligence Platform as the answer to this challenge, offering integrated monitoring across the full application stack—from end-user browser sessions down to dynamic cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The platform is a multi-tenant SaaS solution designed to give every member of a DevOps organization—developers, operations engineers, and business stakeholders alike—a shared, real-time understanding of software performance.
“Enterprises are moving to DevOps in order to create better quality software, faster. New Relic believes having access to the right data is the key to achieving DevOps success,” said Jim Gochee, Chief Product Officer at New Relic. “The New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform delivers full-stack visibility and metrics on the impact of every change on application performance, customer experience, and ultimately business success.”
Four Ways New Relic Supports DevOps Teams
New Relic identified four core capabilities that help DevOps teams move faster while maintaining quality and stability:
1. Greater Collaboration Across the Digital Team
When every team member—developer, ops engineer, or product manager—has access to the same real-time performance data, decision-making improves and finger-pointing decreases. New Relic’s dashboards and alerting tools are designed not just for technical users but also to communicate the business impact of software changes to non-technical stakeholders, bridging the gap between engineering and the rest of the organization.
2. Real-Time Insights on the Impact of Every Change
Every deployment—no matter how small—has the potential to affect infrastructure, application performance, and the customer experience. New Relic surfaces the downstream effects of code changes in real time, allowing teams to correlate a deployment event with a spike in error rates or latency before customers are significantly affected. This closed feedback loop is fundamental to continuous delivery.
3. Agile Development with Measurable Results
New Relic APM (Application Performance Monitoring) and New Relic Browser agents give teams a continuous view of application performance as code is deployed. New Relic Infrastructure extends this visibility to host-level changes, whether servers are running in the cloud or on premises. Combined with threshold-based alerting, teams can immediately identify when a release degrades performance and trigger a rollback before the issue escalates.
4. Easy Integration with Your DevOps Toolchain
A monitoring platform is only as useful as its ability to fit into an existing workflow. New Relic provides APIs and pre-built integrations for key DevOps tools, including:
- CI/CD systems: Deployment markers that annotate performance charts with release events, making it easy to correlate deployments with performance changes.
- Configuration management tools: Automated agent deployment via tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible.
- Collaboration platforms: Alerting integrations with tools such as Slack, PagerDuty, and others, so the right people are notified at the right time.
- Log management: Logging integrations to correlate application logs with performance metrics.
Enterprise DevOps Teams in Practice
Several global enterprises described how New Relic became central to their DevOps transformations.
Concur (an SAP Company)
Kevin Evans, Vice President of DevOps and Cloud Services at Concur, described how the platform supported a shift toward developer ownership and accountability:
“At Concur, the focus of our transformation towards DevOps was to drive innovation velocity, operational accountability and architectural change. Through that process, New Relic data enabled our agile teams to move faster and more confidently with measurable results. New Relic empowers our developers to have full end-to-end ownership of their services. Without this level of accountability, our success in our transition towards DevOps would be much less.”
— Kevin Evans, VP of DevOps and Cloud Services, Concur
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard
Pete McVicar, Head of Information Technology Marketing and Sales Solutions for Pernod Ricard’s Brand Companies—which includes Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard, Chivas Brothers, and The Absolut Company—explained how New Relic fits into two-week sprint cycles:
“Having New Relic in place has really allowed my teams to embrace the DevOps model of constant, agile development. We do two-week sprints in which the weekly email reports from New Relic play a critical role—allowing us to see not only how well new features are performing but how they’re affecting the rest of the site. We use New Relic all the way from testing and development into production—often times rolling out a feature, testing it on a certain content type, and then letting it ‘soak’ for a couple of days with New Relic monitoring. This makes it easy for us to see if things are working the way we intended.”
— Pete McVicar, Head of IT Marketing and Sales Solutions, Pernod Ricard Brand Companies
WOW Air
Kristjan Thorvaldsson, Director of Information Technology at WOW air, highlighted how the airline used New Relic Alerts integrated with Slack to manage performance during high-traffic sales campaigns:
“New Relic is as crucial for the teams running WOW air’s IT infrastructure as the safety management system is for our flight operations. We are integrating a DevOps culture within our team and New Relic enables our developers to understand the infrastructure as they have more responsibility for it. As WOW air undertakes huge sales campaigns to fuel our growth, New Relic Alerts are shared via our Slack channel, allowing our team to stay on top of any performance issues and address them effectively so our guests have an excellent booking experience.”
— Kristjan Thorvaldsson, Director of IT, WOW air
Key Takeaways for DevOps Engineers
The experiences of Concur, Pernod Ricard, and WOW air point to a common theme: observability is not an afterthought in DevOps—it is a prerequisite. Teams that instrument their full stack from day one can:
- Confidently deploy more frequently because they can detect regressions immediately.
- Give developers direct feedback on the operational impact of their code, reinforcing a “you build it, you run it” ownership model.
- Demonstrate the business value of engineering work to non-technical leadership using shared, real-time dashboards.
- Reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) by correlating alerts, deployment events, infrastructure changes, and application traces in a single platform.
Whether your organization is at the beginning of its DevOps journey or scaling mature continuous delivery pipelines, establishing measurable baselines and tracking the impact of every change remains one of the highest-leverage investments a DevOps team can make.
Note: WOW air ceased operations in March 2019. Product features and integrations described in this article reflect New Relic’s capabilities as of early 2017 and may have changed significantly since publication.