This post covers the New Relic Java Agent, and you can find more information in the Java Agent Custom Instrumentation Overview, which addresses the technical approaches for customization from Annotation to XML to the UI Instrumentation Editor. You can see the source code for my examples in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/kenahrens/spring-­travel. We plan to address other New Relic Agents in upcoming blog posts.

Custom Transaction Naming
For: APM
Functionality: Modify the name that shows up in the New Relic UI

Custom Tracers
For: APM
Functionality: Add depth to transaction traces within APM.

Custom Attributes
For: APM and Insights
Functionality: Add extra information to Transaction Traces within APM or Events within Insights.

Custom Events
For: Insights
Functionality: Send an Event to Insights (designed for events that cannot be collected by an agent)

Custom Metrics
For: APM only
Functionality: Send arbitrary metrics to APM (works best for things like connection counts and pool sizes that are not associated with a transaction)

Custom Transaction Naming

New Relic Agents have out-of-the-box rules for how transactions are named in the UI. Unfortunately, sometimes these rules don’t work for your environment, so the Agent API lets you easily modify the Transaction Name to suit your needs.

Be aware that the specific API call varies by language, and you need to place the code in a place where it is called on every Transaction. See below for an example of the Java code:

import com.newrelic.api.agent.NewRelic;
...
public class JpaBookingService implements BookingService {
...
    public List findHotels(SearchCriteria criteria) {
        NewRelic.setTransactionName("Web", "Find Hotels");
        ...
    }
...
}

(See the New Relic documentation on Naming Web Transactions for details about how the Java Agent determines the name for your transaction: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/java-­agent/instrumentation/naming­-web­-transactions.)

Custom Tracers

New Relic Agents include out-of-the-box support for many technology frameworks. Sometimes, however, the framework you use may not be supported, or you may be using a proprietary framework created for internal use at your company.

In those cases, you can create Custom Tracers to add visibility to a framework that New Relic is currently not monitoring. This lets you monitor the performance down to an individual method in your code. Note that the specific API call (or use of XML) varies by language. Additional visibility will show up inside Transaction Traces.

Here’s an example breakdown of what goes into making a Custom Tracer. In this snippet from our GitHub repository, the “blue bubble” shows that time is spent somewhere in HotelsMvcController.list(). We added additional instrumentation using an XML extension. To work, this file should be placed in NEWRELIC_HOME/extensions.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<extension xmlns="https://newrelic.com/docs/java/xsd/v1.0"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="newrelic-extension extension.xsd "
    name="extension-example"
    version="1.0" enabled="true">
    <instrumentation>
        <pointcut transactionStartPoint="true"
            excludeFromTransactionTrace="false"
            ignoreTransaction="false">
            <className>org.springframework.samples.travel.services.JpaBookingService</className>
            <method>
                <name>slowThisDown</name>
            </method>
        </pointcut>
    </instrumentation>
</extension>

(For more information, see our Java Instrumentation by XML documentation: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/java-agent/custom-instrumentation/java-instrumentation-xml.)

Custom Attributes

New Relic Agents collect standard attributes (also called parameters) for every Transaction. But you may have special attributes unique to your application that you want to collect as well. These custom attributes show up in Transaction Traces as well as Insights Events.

The Agent API makes it easy to add Custom Attributes. In Java, for example, simply place this code from our GitHub repository where it is called on every Transaction:

import com.newrelic.api.agent.NewRelic;
...
public class JpaBookingService implements BookingService {
...
    public List findHotels(SearchCriteria criteria) {
        ...
        String pattern = getSearchPattern(criteria);
        log.debug("search pattern: " + pattern);
        NewRelic.addCustomParameter("searchCriteria",pattern );
        ...
    }
...
}

(For more information, see Insights Custom Attributes in the New Relic documentation: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/insights/new-relic-insights/decorating-events/insights-custom-attributes.)

Custom Events

Custom Events are used when you want to record several pieces of metadata that all belong together as part of a “rich event,” typically one that occurs on an irregular basis. For example, you might want to record an event whenever a booking is made and include data such as Revenue, Hotel Name, Hotel City, and so on.

Through the Agent API, these Custom Events can be added as a new Event Type in Insights.

To add a Custom Event, you would create a map showing the relevant Key / Value pairs, and then publish the event using the API. Here’s an example in Java:

HashMap bookingMap = new HashMap();
bookingMap.put("BookingNumberOfNights",booking.getNights() );
bookingMap.put("BookingRevenue",
    Integer.valueOf(booking.getTotal().intValue()) );
bookingMap.put("BookingRate",
    Integer.valueOf(booking.getHotel().getPrice().intValue() ) );
bookingMap.put("BookingHotelName",
    booking.getHotel().getName() +
    " - " + booking.getHotel().getCity() +
    ", " + booking.getHotel().getState() );
...
bookingMap.put("BookingAgent",booking.getUser().getName() );
NewRelic.getAgent().getInsights().recordCustomEvent("Booking Event", bookingMap);

(For more information, see Inserting Custom Events Via New Relic APM Agents: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/insights/new-relic-insights/adding-querying-data/inserting-custom-events-new-relic-apm-agents.)

Custom Metrics

Out of the box, New Relic supports standard non-transactional metrics. But Custom Metrics can be used to record special metrics—including most arbitrary numeric values, such as the revenue value of a completed booking on the Spring Travel application shown below. Custom Metrics can be displayed in Custom Dashboards, or used in Alert Policies. Basically, Custom Metrics can be used for anything numeric that you want to monitor and graph.

To use Custom Metrics, simply add a call to send the numeric metric with a name like Custom/Metric Name. Here’s an example in Java:

import com.newrelic.api.agent.NewRelic;
...
public class JpaBookingService implements BookingService {
...
    public void persistBooking(Booking booking) {
        ...
        NewRelic.recordMetric("Custom/Booking Revenue",
            Integer.valueOf(booking.getTotal().intValue()) );
        ...
    }
...
}

(For more information on why you use Custom Metrics within APM, see Custom Metrics in the New Relic documentation: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/data­-analysis/metrics/custom­-metrics

Other languages

The post addressed the New Relic Java Agent, but the process is similar for all languages supported by New Relic. We plan to address other New Relic Agents in upcoming blog posts.

That’s the story told by both our guests on the latest episode of The New Stack @ Scale Podcast: Tung Nguyen, vice-president of engineering at Bleacher Report, and our own Lee Atchison, principal cloud architect & advocate at New Relic.

Tung tells The New Stack founder and Editor in Chief Alex Williams and me the tale of how Bleacher Report scaled its infrastructure from a WordPress-style blog with 50,000 monthly unique visitors in 2007 to its current position serving as a premier sports site serving some 80 million uniques every month. He talks about the decisions they made and the misconceptions they struggled with along the way—and he reveals why a certain Miley Cyrus song best describes Bleacher Report’s journey.

Lee, meanwhile, shares how New Relic moved from a big, monolithic Ruby app to a distributed ecosystem with multiple different services and microservices, mostly running in Java—although the frontend is still in Ruby. (For more on our journey, watch New Relic engineering VPs Nic Benders and Matthew Flaming take you inside the process at FutureStack15.)

Plus, you’ll hear Tung and Lee offer insights into the following fascinating topics:

• When scaling should end (hint: “hopefully never”)
• Why Ruby shouldn’t get blamed for slow performance
• How to organize a DevOps team
• Why managing multiple services is like the War on Drugs
• Why being a full-stack developer should be considered a “transitional phase” for junior engineers
• The importance of having inexperienced devs on your team
• What Facebook really means when it says “Move Fast and Break Things”
• How microservices enables small teams of developers to do big things
• Overcoming the psychological stress of moving to DevOps

All this and much more—including our guests’ reactions to Adrian Cockcroft talking about visualizing data models and dependencies—in this episode of The New Stack @ Scale Podcast.

New Relic is a sponsor of the New Stack @ Scale Podcast. However, the content and views expressed are those of the participants of the New Stack @ Scale Podcast, which is the property of The New Stack. Any views expressed on the New Stack @ Scale Podcast do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. By embedding the audio for the New Stack @ Scale Podcast or linking to The New Stack, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on The New Stack site.

Read more about the podcast in Luke Lefler’s post on The New Stack: The New Stack @ Scale Podcast: How to Scale Beyond Your First 50,000 Users 

If you are a regular New Relic user, you may already be aware of the events and activities in the community. Perhaps you have even helped spread the word about our products and features by blogging, speaking, answering questions on the New Relic Community Forum, or organizing a user group. The Ambassador Program is our way to make sure people like you are properly recognized and thanked for your efforts.

Your level of involvement is up to you, and the members of the New Relic community team are here to help you organize local user groups, meetups, events, submit abstracts to conference calls for papers (CFP), or create and share your technical projects. You’ll be able to be part of the conversation, win awesome New Relic swag, and interact with our community managers and developer advocates. As a pioneering Ambassador, the more you help us, the more we will give you exclusive opportunities to talk with our teams, improve your skill set, and achieve personal and professional growth.

Why participate in the New Relic Ambassador Program?

• Share your story. Did you have an interesting challenge or issue and a New Relic product helped solve the problem? Assist other New Relic users by sharing what you learned or figured out.
• Enhance your skill set. The best way to get better at something is to practice, so why not practice your writing, event organizing, or public speaking about technologies you already love? There will be a variety of opportunities to create and share your content!
• Expand your network. Participation in the program will allow you to expand your network, meet and collaborate with other Ambassadors, and have exclusive access to members of the New Relic team.
• Have fun while doing it. We’re planning exciting challenges and contests for Ambassadors to participate in with the goal of building community and learning!

Datanauts unite!

We have given our Ambassadors the nickname of “Datanauts” because technology is a vast and near-infinite space to explore. We hope that our Ambassadors are up to the challenge of exploring it with us!

Each action an Ambassador completes will unlock a reward. These rewards aren’t just cool swag (although who doesn’t love swag?). The rewards also include meaningful ways for you to connect with us here at New Relic. We’re initially announcing three levels, but there will be more as the program grows and we get feedback from you about what you love!

Becoming a New Relic Ambassador is fun and easy, and we want to provide you with the resources and opportunities to become part of a larger community, both online and off. No matter what language you work in, what products you use, or what level of expertise you have, you can participate and become a Datanaut.

To get started, check out the New Relic Ambassador Program website. We can’t wait to hear from you!

This new environment requires CIOs to be both more proactive and more collaborative than ever before. Instead of making their own decisions and pretty much forcing the entire company to go along, these trends mean CIOs must now work with their peers across the entire business to orchestrate and balance what types of work is done in house versus what gets outsourced to the cloud, SaaS, contractors, and others in order to meet the needs of digital transformation efforts, changing business models, and increasingly savvy and empowered users, not just traditional central IT constituencies.

It’s not an option; it’s table stakes for modern CIOs. If the CIO can’t figure out how to lead the way toward using technology to change the company’s business or its relationship with customers, they risk being sidelined as a mere cost center—as business users increasingly turn to their own “Shadow IT” solutions.

To minimize that threat, enterprise IT must embrace each individual business unit’s IT autonomy and quickly identify and satisfy fast-evolving user requirements. That’s the only way to encourage as many people as possible to use company-approved and monitored solutions.

At the same time, of course, IT remains responsible for controlling system sprawl, which could weaken security and generate systemic inefficiencies.

Fortunately, there are some best practices to help CIOs stay ahead of the issue and become a trusted broker of IT services:

1. Deliver powerful, stable, easy-to-use services—fast

According to a research study conducted by Avanade, 79% of C-level executives believe they could make technology decisions better and faster than IT staff. In order to demonstrate the value of its knowledge and expertise, your IT team needs to be agile and act fast. However, speed cannot mean compromising the quality of software services. You need to develop vetting procedures that enable fast solution assessments and purchasing decisions that quickly identify robust, secure, and user-friendly solutions that can be quickly implemented to meet user needs before they invest in Shadow IT alternatives. Today’s users are accustomed to fast, powerful, beautifully implemented consumer apps—they won’t stand for sub-standard software experiences.

See also: New Relic’s CIO Yvonne Wassenaar on 2016 Priorities and Challenges for CIOs

2. Rely on structured vendor assessments

Becoming proficient in finding and qualifying third-party vendors is a must to become a credible orchestrator of cloud services. As opposed to assessing software vendors for your internal data center where OS support, patching, and release frequency is a big deal, learning about a cloud solution’s robustness also involves examining its hosting environment, security, and financial health. When qualifying a third-party cloud solution, check who has access to your data and applications and how they are protected. It’s critical to become familiar with your vendors’ SLAs and how you can be indemnified against events such as data loss and outages. You will also need to be savvy about understanding SaaS and other provider financial metrics.

See also: New Relic Joins Cloud Security Alliance to Promote SaaS Security

3. Learn to manage the hybrid cloud

Public cloud options require no hardware on-premises, typically making them faster to implement, enabling your team to respond quickly to end-user requirements. Private cloud solutions can complement the public cloud option by providing a clear boundary that lets you keep sensitive or proprietary data and applications under your control. As a technology broker, your team is charged with creating a balance between the different clouds, deciding which workloads should be kept internally and which best suit a public cloud environment. It’s also up to you to monitor application performance in your hybrid cloud installations, which can be surprisingly complex.

See also:
How New Relic and Our Partners Can Help Ease the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Migration
The Hybrid Cloud SLA Challenge: Before, During, and After

4. Properly allocate costs

CIOs have always been expected to present proven operational efficiencies under tight budget constraints. With the move to a cloud-based OpEx model, implementing cost allocation can be challenging. Shadow IT and transitions from waterfall to agile development makes the process even more complex. The cloud requires IT teams to consistently tag cloud resources for specific applications or business units. The goal is to help business unit team leaders become more aware of and accountable for their cloud consumption and expenses. Being able to allocate costs per unit enhances transparency and enables you to more quickly identify inefficiencies. Subsequent action can then be taken to optimize each unit, eliminating redundancies and consolidating applications and resources. This can also help curb Shadow IT by highlighting the overall costs of cloud sprawl.

See also: Two Ways Forward? Gartner Data Center Conference Ponders How ‘Bimodal IT’ Can Help Digital Business

5. Support business-unit autonomy

One proven way to broker IT services is to allow each business unit to self-provision applications and resources from your organization’s overall IT portfolio, which you need to control and manage. It is equally important for every unit to easily report back to IT headquarters, preserving traditional showback and chargeback methods. As your organization’s IT broker, your task is to embrace each unit’s IT autonomy while maintaining control over IT operations as a whole.

See also: Redefining the Role of CIO: A Gartner Symposium ITXPO 2015 Perspective

Final Notes

The CIO is the role model for embracing modern IT in the organization. Your team needs to take a proactive approach, making fast decisions to support individual business units while still maintaining control over your environment’s security and stability.

That’s only the beginning, of course. Truly successful modern CIOs must go beyond meeting their users’ immediate requirements—no matter how collaboratively—and provide leadership toward innovative, transformative technologies that promise real competitive advantage, not just keeping the lights on. But learning to drive technology forward through collaboration, orchestration, and brokering instead of command and control is an essential first step.

As companies strive to improve and scale their applications as fast as possible, they risk exposing themselves to an ever-expanding array of sophisticated cyber attacks. Such attacks threaten enterprises and customers alike.

In order to reduce their vulnerability and stay focused on delivering high-quality apps, companies are increasingly seeking outside help. One place they can find it is Veracode.

Veracode provides automated, cloud-based security for Web, mobile, and cloud applications. This subscription-based service offers a unified platform for multiple assessment technologies—one that more than 800 organizations depend on every single day. Those organizations include three of the top four banks (not to mention more than 20 other brands) in the Fortune 100.

Veracode helps its customers build and deploy software faster—without sacrificing security. The company says its cloud-based platform has assessed more than 1.5 trillion lines of code and performed 200,000 vulnerability scans on public Web-facing applications, for hundreds of the largest enterprises worldwide.

Total commitment

With so many high-profile clients depending on Veracode for round-the-clock protection, the company has to be totally committed to customer satisfaction. It’s critical that the service is always available and delivering fast turnaround times to support customers’ agile development cycles.

Such commitment was presenting challenges, however. The difficulties of identifying and resolving performance issues were leading to confusion and frustration. The result? Breakdowns in communication and collaboration, culminating in frequent finger-pointing across different teams responsible for different parts of the tech stack.

CIO Bill Brown and his colleagues knew exactly what they needed: a SaaS-based, purpose-built tool for performance monitoring and software analytics. “New Relic was at the top of our list,” says Brown.

Full deployment

Veracode deployed the New Relic Software Analytics Cloud (including New Relic APM, New Relic Browser, New Relic Insights, New Relic Servers, and New Relic Synthetics) to monitor both its customer-facing platform and its internal business systems.

After initially using New Relic to scrutinize post-deployment performance, the depth and usefulness of the data at its disposal soon convinced the Veracode team to expand that usage across its entire environment, including development, pre-production, and production, both on-premises and in the cloud.

New Relic helps Veracode scale its service to support the massive number of applications its customers need to scan, while maintaining performance and availability. That’s great news for Veracode customers, and it makes life easier for employees, too. “Our engineers love having all the application data in a single pane of glass,” says Patrick Hetherton, director of SaaS operations.

Critical confidence

Thanks to the deep visibility provided by New Relic, frustration and finger-pointing are much less prevalent. Troubleshooting is now faster and more effective, and the company has been able to reach a more mature stage with its DevOps approach. Most important, Bill Brown and his team can approach each new work week feeling empowered and equipped to tackle whatever comes their way.

“I appreciate the reports I get from New Relic on Monday mornings because they give me a good snapshot of what happened during the past week, and visibility into any trends that we need to act on,” says Brown. “The insight I get from New Relic gives me confidence that the team is responding to critical alerts when we get them, and being proactive about delivering a good customer experience.”

Watch the Veracode customer video below:

To get the complete story, be sure to read the full Veracode case study.

Cloud security image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

TWiMS Top Story:
Meet the 20 Tech Insiders Defining the 2016 Campaign—Wired

What it’s about: Against a backdrop of an unpredictable 2016 presidential campaign, Wired examines the outsized role Silicon Valley now plays in the political process, with the November election likely to set a new bar for that influence. Since Barack Obama tapped the power of data and social media to turbocharge his campaign in 2008, just about everyone else in American politics has followed suit. “Since then, every politician has learned what every startup knows in its bones: You live and die by software,” writes Michael Hainey. Because of that and other factors, tech companies and their executives have become major forces in the political system. The Wired staff has ranked the 20 most powerful political players in the tech universe, with themes underpinning them all: data, software, communications reach, and more.

Why you should care: If you think it’s just a list of Silicon Valley’s richest and most famous, think again: Yes, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made the list (#2), as did Google’s Eric Schmidt (#1). But most of the power players here are far from household names, especially outside of the political arena. Rather, they’re techies who connected the dots between technology innovation and the political machine. Take 29-year-old Justin McConney, who comes in at #3. McConney didn’t found a unicorn startup. His modest claim to fame? He introduced Donald Trump to social media. Today, Trump counts more than 5 million Twitter followers alone (more than Hillary Clinton) and receives massive online attention for his, uh, colorful thoughts. Aidan King and David Frederick? Not exactly venture-backed software entrepreneurs, either. King works at a winery in Vermont, and Frederick works at Crate & Barrel. But they’re on the list at #6 because they’re “two dudes who started a Reddit forum for [Bernie] Sanders in 2013” that helped the candidate nearly erase Hillary Clinton’s lead in the New Hampshire polls as well as raise significant donations and mobilize volunteers. The latter includes a group of Reddit readers who built Sanders a website promoting his positions, free of charge. The whole list is worth checking out, and underscores the literally democratic power of software and the Web.

What the Interview Process Is Like at Google, Apple, Amazon, and Other Tech Companies—Fast Company

What it’s about: This time of year the Web abounds with advice and lists on nabbing the best jobs in tech, from data scientist to software engineer to mobile developer. But what does it take to land one of these positions? Quite a lot, it turns out, in spite of the notorious war for top technical talent. Top tech employers, in particular, are not in a hurry to send out offer letters, according to a Fast Company piece based on data from Glassdoor, GetVoIP, and others. “Unfortunately, even that level of demand isn’t making the time to hire a qualified candidate any shorter. For those about to embark on a search, expect it to take a long time,” writes Lydia Dishman. “In fact, the average interview process now takes 23 days, up from 13 days four years ago.” And that’s just the average: Software engineers have it the worst, with an average interview duration of 35 days in spite of their highly sought-after skills.

Why you should care: If you’re on the market, expect to be there a little while. The hiring picture is still rosy, but Fast Company’s story reminds us that even modern software pros don’t necessarily have carte blanche with potential employers. To make it in, you need to navigate phone screens, coding tests, online assessments, and of course on-site interviews—if you get that far. All of these things take time—weeks in the case of many tech employers. Interestingly, there’s not necessarily a relationship between the length of the interview process and the candidate’s satisfaction with that process. While Uber and Yahoo had among the shortest interview duration (two weeks), according to a GetVoIP analysis of the software engineer hiring process at 13 major tech companies, they ranked relatively low in terms of their candidates’ perceived interview experience. Among other findings: Twitter ranked lowest in interview experience, with just 35% reporting a positive experience. Google’s well-publicized interview hurdles bore out in a measure of perceived interview difficulty: The company topped that list, followed by Uber, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. 

Further reading:

• 10 Best Tech Jobs for 2016—InformationWeek
• Why ‘Data Scientist’ Is This Year’s Hottest Job—Computerworld

Tech’s ‘Frightful 5’ Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future—The New York Times

What it’s about: Farhad Manjoo examines just how powerful technology’s Powers That Be—namely, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and a resurgent Microsoft—have been during the last decade and counting, and why no one’s likely to unseat any member of this “Frightful 5” in the near future. Identifying tech’s oligarchy doesn’t exactly require deep investigative reporting, but the concentration of power in these five companies is something many consumers probably don’t give much thought to, even as they fuel that very power. As Manjoo notes, these five companies have built their businesses in such a way that even other massively successful tech firms depend heavily on them—Netflix’s well-publicized use of Amazon’s cloud platform is a prime example. Even the tin-foil hat crowd is hard-pressed to unplug itself from the reach of all five companies. “These platforms are inescapable; you may opt out of one or two of them, but together, they form a gilded mesh blanketing the entire economy,” Manjoo writes.

Why you should care: The real issue is that there doesn’t appear to be any looming threat to this group’s dominance. That’s noteworthy in an industry that treats the word “disruption” with religious reverence, and one with a long history of supposed superpowers (think IBM or HP) losing out to newer upstarts. So while Silicon Valley denizens might like to play the “Who’s losing” game —Manjoo describes the cocktail party game of picking which of the five will drop off the Mount Rushmore of tech first—it’s a silly exercise. The answer is: None of the above. Will that always be true? Not necessarily, as Manjoo and others point out. In a recent op-ed piece for Re/code, Accenture’s Managing Director for Digital Strategy Bruno Berthon lists his three myths of the digital economy, one of which is that “the online giants will continue to dominate the digital economy.” At the moment, though, that statement would appear equally safe on a list of “Facts About the Digital Economy”—or simply, “Facts About the Economy.”

Further reading:

• 3 Myths About the Digital Economy—Re/code

App Annie 2015: Google Play Saw 100% More Downloads Than the iOS App Store, but Apple Generated 75% More Revenue—VentureBeat

What it’s about: Who’s king of the app economy, Google or Apple? It depends on how you keep score. By total downloads, Google Play is, frankly, kicking the Apple App Store’s you-know-what. Google delivered twice as many app downloads in 2015 as Apple, according to App Annie’s latest annual report, and the gap between the two appears to be growing. But iOS developers aren’t necessarily licking their wounds: VentureBeat notes that, in spite of Google Play beating out Apple in terms of app downloads, the latter—and developers in turn—earns far more revenue from its store, a whopping 75% more in 2015. As with total downloads, the dollar gap also appears to be growing, up 5% from the previous year. “Once again we have proof that Google Play is bigger than Apple’s App Store. And once again we’re learning that iOS developers, and thus Apple with its cut, tend to make more than Android developers and Google,” writes VentureBeat’s Emil Protalinksi.

Why you should care: In a sense, this is just a reaffirmation of what mobile developers already knew: Google’s Android offers the greatest global reach, thanks in large part to its much greater device market share. Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, is where the deeper pockets live: iPhone and iPad users have always been more inclined to spend money on their apps than Android users. Their geographies also differ. Android’s download growth is a global story, with emerging markets like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and Mexico driving Google Play. Apple’s revenue growth was strongest in the United States, Japan, and China. (App Annie’s report expects China to overtake the U.S. and Japan in terms of iOS revenue during 2016.) While the reality is that, except in some very specific use cases, your apps need to be on both platforms, the business models on the two platforms could be very different. If global eyeballs—and advertising—are your goal, you might want to think Android first. But for direct app sales, iOS still rules.

Further reading: 

• China Poised to Overtake U.S. & Japan in iOS Revenue Within the Next Year—TechCrunch
• App Annie 2015 Retrospective—Monetization Opens New Frontiers—App Annie

Businesses Look at New Analytics Methods for 2016—TechTarget

What it’s about: If it seems like your business has only scratched the surface of what’s possible with data analytics, you’re not alone. TechTarget’s Ed Burns looks at the 2016 goals of various organizations looking to harness more value from their data. The general theme: Companies that have established a good handle on basic analytics are now, in effect, getting greedy; they want more advanced methods for mining, analyzing, and acting on their information troves. At marketing and PR firm M Booth Associates, for example, Chief Analytics Officer Jeff Bodzewski says he’s already leveraged audience analytics to get the right message to the right customer. This year, Bodzewski wants to ensure that message is delivered at precisely the right time and place, too, relying more heavily on geolocation and other mobile data.

Why you should care: While terms like “analytics” might already seem established by tech industry standards, we’re still just getting started. The limits of what’s possible are continuously being tested and redrawn, and data-driven organizations have plenty of opportunities to get an edge on the competition. Natural-language processing and machine learning may still be in their relative infancy, for example, but that’s not stopping Nationwide Insurance Chief Data Officer Wes Hunt. Burns reports that Hunt’s team will invest more heavily in the cognitive computing methods for data analytics for automating and streamlining certain internal processes as well as elements of the customer experience. Hunt’s not giving up the details on how they’re doing that, of course, but suffice it to say your competition is already cooking up new ways to maximize their data in 2016 and beyond. Are you?

Microsoft Is Donating $1B in Cloud Services for ‘Public Good’—eWeek

What it’s about: Last week, CEO Satya Nadella snagged a personal invite from the First Lady to the State of the Union in recognition of Microsoft’s efforts in technology education. This week, Redmond makes news with a $1 billion commitment of cloud computing resources to 70,000 nonprofits and NGOs as well as 900 university research facilities globally over the next three years. The initiative is part of Microsoft’s recently launched philanthropic division, Microsoft Philanthropies, which intends to expand technology and information access in communities and regions where it is most lacking. This first major commitment under the Microsoft Philanthropies banner underlines the “public” in public cloud. As both Nadella and Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith noted in separate blog posts, unlocking the full power of modern technology depends upon empowering widespread access and education, not just in tech centers, but in communities of all shapes and sizes around the world.

Why you should care: The enormous potential of cloud computing—and especially public cloud resources—should not be limited to the financial and technical elite. Microsoft’s commitment is a welcome recognition of that, and one that will hopefully inspire similar initiatives among the big names in tech. Smith notes in his blog post that in spite of the public cloud’s massive growth in recent years, “it is not yet benefitting everyone.” And everyone is indeed Microsoft’s goal: “Cloud computing has emerged as a vital resource for addressing the world’s problems,” Smith writes. “Cloud services can unlock the secrets held by data in ways that create new insights and lead to breakthroughs, not just for science and technology, but for addressing the full range of economic and social challenges and the delivery of better human services.” Hear, hear!

Further reading:

• How Today’s Nonprofits Leverage Technology—Modern Software Podcast
• How Technology Helps Three Nonprofits Make the World a Better Place [Video]—New Relic Blog
• We’re Expanding Our Nonprofit Program to the Entire New Relic Software Analytics Cloud [Video]—New Relic Blog

Want to suggest something that we should cover in the next edition of TWiMS? Email us at blog@newrelic.com.

Tune In to the Future

Can’t get enough modern software news and commentary? Be sure to check out our new Modern Software Podcast. New Relic Editor-in-Chief Fredric Paul and guests discuss the most important things happening in the world of software analytics, cloud computing, application monitoring, development methodologies, programming languages, and more. Listen to episode 5 or subscribe on iTunes.

Job interview, apps, and cloud ladder images courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

John Paul of VenueNext

So we were thrilled to have VenueNext founder and CEO John Paul visit the New Relic Modern Software Podcast to discuss how his company is using analytics to prep for the intense spotlight. As John says, “The whole world is watching” and you have to be at the top of your game. He also tells us about VenueNext’s impressive growth into even more high-profile venues since his keynote 15 months ago at FutureStack14. He even shares secrets on how anyone can use the apps to check out the celebrities in attendance at the game. [timecode 19:54]

And, of course, the regular crew—co-host Tori Wieldt, New Relic Senior VP of Marketing Jay Fry, and our VP of Customer Analytics Todd Etchieson—dissect recent news and trends ripped from the pages of This Week in Modern Software (TWiMS). In this episode, we examine the prominent role tech played in President Obama’s Statue of the Union address and look at a controversial new big data application now being tested by law enforcement. [1:51]

All this and much more in the New Relic Modern Software Podcast … because life’s too short for bad software.

New Relic was the host of the attached forum presented in the embedded podcast. However, the content and views expressed are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. By hosting the podcast, New Relic does not necessarily adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products referenced therein.

Don’t Miss The New Stack @ Scale

Finally, if you enjoyed The Modern Software Podcast, be sure to also listen to The New Stack @ Scale, produced by The New Stack and sponsored by New Relic. Co-hosted by The New Stack founder and Editor in Chief Alex Williams and myself, The New Stack @ Scale podcast is intended to address developing and managing dynamic services and systems in the new world of scaled-out architectures. You can listen to the latest episode here.

Note: The intro music for the Modern Software Podcast is courtesy of Audionautix. 

But Jason Chan, an engineering director at Netflix who is responsible for security there, showed FutureStack15 attendees that it doesn’t have to be that way. In his presentation on “Splitting the Check on Compliance and Security,” he shared how Netflix moved its PCI and SOX environments to the cloud to satisfy both auditors and developers “without ripping each others’ hair out.”

For developers, Jason said, 2015 was “like a kid in a candy store.” But for auditors, every step in 2015 was “fraught with peril.” The groups have different incentives and perspectives, he explained, and they want and need different things.

DevOps, he said, can help resolve this disconnect by changing the mindset of developers to take responsibility for running the code they write. Once that happens, developers who find they need to “support” the system are more in alignment with auditors who need to “verify” the system.

The key to devs and auditors becoming “best friends,” Jason said, is to replace the check-box approach to compliance with a pillar-based approach where “regardless of any particular regulatory requirements, I’m just going to design things around these core operational principles … and as a result of that I’m going to be able to meet compliance requirements.”

Jason took attendees on a deep dive into each of the three pillars of this approach:

1. Traceability in development
2. Continuous security visibility
3. Compartmentalization

He also explained how Spinnaker, a newly open sourced system Netflix built to support continuous deployment in the company’s AWS cloud environment, helps the team deal with each one.

To put it all together, Jason advised attendees to limit investments in approaches that meet narrow regulatory needs, and instead embrace core security and design principles and focus on tools and techniques that serve multiple audiences—developers and auditors, for example.

You can see all available FutureStack15 presentation videos, including the keynotes, at our FutureStack15 YouTube playlist. We’ll be adding even more in the coming days and weeks, so subscribe now!

Film reel image courtesy of Shutterstock.com. Jason Chan photo © Andrew Weeks Photography.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in these presentations are those of the respective speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. By providing access to these presentations, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products discussed therein. The respective presentation speakers have given permission to New Relic to post the content they presented onstage.

Just ask Wing Sung, New Relic’s senior email marketing operations specialist. As a marketing automation guru with years of marketing operations and demand generation experience, Wing knows all about the ins and outs of email marketing, especially when it’s done using the popular marketing automation platform Marketo. From email execution and deliverability reporting to nurturing campaigns and A/B testing, Wing handles most of the external communications going out to our customers, and together with the rest of the Marketing Operations team, she’s one of our key resources for marketing technology guidance.

We recently sat down with Wing to chat about modern marketing best practices and what it takes to run a successful email marketing operation. Here’s what we learned.

5 email marketing tips for the modern marketer

1. Set communication limits. At New Relic, we’ve established a rule to send no more than two emails a day (or five emails in one week) to a single contact in our system. Of course, this can be easier said than done when different people from different teams are sending out emails to different subsets of people. Marketo makes it easy to prevent over-communication by allowing you to set a communication limit on your outbound emails—so take advantage of it!
2. Master the art of the subject line. As a general rule, “your subject line should be no more than 12 words long,” says Wing. “When people open emails on a smaller mobile device, they likely won’t read past the first five or six words, so keep it short and keep it relevant.” Before sending anything out, Wing uses Litmus to see how an email will render in different email clients to make sure nothing funky is going on.

3. Avoid sounding spammy. By now, a lot of us know what this sounds like. The caps lock-heavy sentences. Words like “guaranteed” and “free.” Says Wing, “I get so many emails from companies advertising a FREE ebook or FREE webinar, and it’s really kind of meaningless when you think about it—how often do you end up paying for a webinar? They’re all free.” If you want to avoid the spam folder, don’t sound like an infomercial.
4. Be mindful of your audience. This tip not only ties back to the importance of the subject line, but also has to do with more logistical aspects of email marketing, like the timing of when you send it out to people. For example, when sending emails to an international audience, you should be aware of different time zones and make sure they receive it when they’re likely online, not at 4 a.m., advises Wing. She uses Marketo’s segmentation feature to define our audience by geographic location and send emails at the optimal time.

This chart is populated with sample data. It is not representative of actual numbers.

5. Embrace A/B testing. The best way to get better at anything? Keep experimenting and see what works and what doesn’t. For example, a recent test Wing conducted was to find out whether or not sending a follow-up reminder email after the initial webinar invite increased registration. The result? Yes, it does. Sending a follow-up email increased registration by more than 1.5x. “We’ll also A/B test call-to-action buttons and subject lines to see which copy generates better results,” says Wing. “There should always be room for more A/B testing when it comes to email marketing.”

This chart is populated with sample data. It is not representative of actual numbers.

Looking for more marketing automation tips? Wing recommends following Marketo master Josh Hill, principal consultant at Marketing Rockstar Guides. For tips on how to use Marketo with New Relic Insights, read this blog post to learn how you can build real-time dashboards and analytics that show exactly how your marketing programs are doing.

Background image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

We have a saying here at Blue Medora that exemplifies our singular focus on creating best-of-breed plugins: “The plugin is the platform.”

Creating highly differentiated, value-added plugins is all we do and all we’ve ever done over the nine years of Blue Medora’s existence. Knowing that, you shouldn’t be surprised that we are extremely passionate about building world-class plugins.

Developing plugins for New Relic was a no-brainer for Blue Medora given our deep admiration for the New Relic platform, the company’s partner-friendly open ecosystem, and the massive increase in adoption of New Relic we’ve seen within our existing customer base during the past couple of years.

Blue Medora recently published the first 8 of a planned family of 35 New Relic plugins on our 2016 roadmap, as a public beta. These are visible today on Blue Medora’s website and in New Relic’s Plugin Central:

Blue Medora’s first eight New Relic plugins shown in Plugin Central

Blue Medora’s First 8 Plugins

Our initial set of plugins are focused on extending the reach of New Relic to a common set of storage, compute (server), network, and converged infrastructure technologies we see in both traditional on-premise data centers as well as in private/hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Exposing key SAN metrics like IOPS, throughput, and capacity. [click to enlarge]

Converged Infrastructure

• Blue Medora FlexPod Plugin for New Relic
• Blue Medora VCE Vblock Plugin for New Relic

Storage

• Blue Medora EMC VNX Block Plugin for New Relic
• Blue Medora EMC VNX File Plugin for New Relic
• Blue Medora NetApp Storage Plugin for New Relic

Compute (Servers)

• Blue Medora Cisco UCS Plugin for New Relic
• Blue Medora Dell Compute Plugin for New Relic

Network Fabric

• Blue Medora Cisco Nexus Plugin for New Relic

These first eight Blue Medora Plugins for New Relic are available today as a public beta, directly from New Relic. We encourage users to check them out and provide feedback via Plugin Central’s review system.