Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Using observability to build trust & improve incident response times (PRT317)

Summary

Jordan Spiers from New Relic opened the session, emphasizing the importance of observability in modern cloud environments and its role in operational excellence and business outcomes.
Mikhailail, General Manager from CloudAware, and Sam Brindley from New York Life Insurance shared their journey of adopting AWS with New Relic, focusing on the concept of the observable enterprise.
Key objectives discussed were building trust, reducing noise, and increasing coverage through integration, automation, and governance.
The session covered the importance of early decision-making in cloud transformations, the need for accurate assessments, and post-migration visibility.
New Relic's partnership with AWS and strategic partners like CloudAware was highlighted as crucial for customer success.
The talk included a technical demonstration of using Terraform for alerting as code, enabling developers to autonomously manage and monitor their AWS resources with New Relic.

Observability is not just about monitoring but about providing actionable insights and confidence to make changes without causing downtime.
Modern cloud transformations require a departure from one-size-fits-all approaches, emphasizing the need for tailored solutions and early planning.
The concept of the observable enterprise is central to managing large-scale cloud environments, with a focus on trust, noise reduction, and coverage.
Integration, automation, and governance are key pillars in achieving an observable enterprise, with tools like CloudAware playing a pivotal role.
The shift-left approach empowers developers to take ownership of monitoring and alerting, reducing bureaucracy and enabling scalability.
New Relic's Terraform integration allows for alerting as code, providing developers with the tools to manage monitoring and alerting in a self-service manner.
The cost implications of monitoring strategies were discussed, with a comparison between pull (CloudWatch API) and push (Kinesis stream) methods.
The session underscored the importance of communication with business stakeholders to build trust and ensure they understand the state of IT operations.