New Analytics, Mobile Crash Reporting and More Announced by New Relic at FutureStack 14

New Relic announced a number of new products and upcoming products at its FutureStack 14 conference held last week in San Francisco. Among the announcements was New Relic’s purchase of Ducksboard, a privately held startup based in Barcelona, Spain, that helps customers visualize and monitor data in real time from multiple data sources in a single dashboard. 

According to New Relic, “Ducksboard’s expertise and cloud-based technology will contribute to New Relic in two key ways. First, it will help expand our ability to integrate business-oriented data from a variety of leading Software-as-a-Service application sources. And second, it will work to further enhance New Relic’s data visualization prowess. Ducksboard has built integrations with 65 applications, including Google Analytics, Twitter, MailChimp, Stripe, WordPress, salesforce.com, Zendesk, and many others, including New Relic. Their work is a great match with our vision of providing businesses the data insights they need quickly and easily to help make faster, better-informed decisions.”

Also announced were five new or updated product offerings:

A new stand-alone product, the New Relic Browser gives front-end developers code-level visibility into browser-based JavaScript applications, providing performance and error diagnostics throughout the entire end user experience, even after the page loads.

With the Browser, New Relic is expanding Application Performance Monitoring (APM) into client-side applications, and adding some new functionality available with a New Relic Browser Pro subscription.

Included is a new Standalone Browser deployment method which offers a copy-and-paste option to put the New Relic’s JavaScript snippet directly into an application template. Simply create (or choose) a Browser application, copy the generated code, and paste it into the HEAD of the HTML before any other <script> tag in the code. Deploy the app, and that’s it. Performance data will start flowing immediately.

Also, browser transactions (like Page views and AJAX requests) are now named with URLs, which makes it easier to search for transactions. They have also added the ability to search through transactions to find specific ones. There is also the option to customize URL naming schemes with a URL whitelist.

New Relic has also unveiled a new feature called Session Traces which offers visibility into individual page views. For randomly sampled transactions New Relic records the entire lifecycle of the page (up to 10 minutes) by logging asset loads, AJAX requests, JavaScript errors, iframes, JavaScript events and callbacks, and even user interactions. This provides the ability to scroll through the timeline and quickly identify performance issues.

New Relic Insights offers new features geared for business users around cohorts and funnels, providing analysis and new visualizations for segmentation of customer behavior.

This product release includes four key features:

- Funnels to see how consumers are progressing towards the business goals in an application.

- Cohort analysis for analyzing engagement within an application over time.

- New math functions which allow users to create composite metrics from multiple attributes providing the ability to see the number of actions per unique registered user that are changing over time.

- Bucketing for grouping numerical values over a range, to help better summarize data.

Updated features in the New Relic Mobile platform includes the addition of crash reporting capabilities that can help resolve bugs that cause mobile apps to crash on users’ devices. With the addition of crash reporting, New Relic Mobile becomes an end-to-end mobile solution providing code-level visibility from the mobile device - including crashes and insight into users.

New Relic Mobile’s crash reporting is designed to optimize and help prioritize one of the largest bottlenecks in the development lifecycle - the time it takes to resolve unanticipated exceptions. Developers can get a glimpse into the frequency and volume of crashes reporting in (up to the minute), and the number of unique users being impacted by those crashes.

Email notifications alert developers when a new type of crash is detected. As additional users experience that same crash, the stats keep rolling in. From the crash overview screen, developers can prioritize their time based on which crashes are happening most often and/or impacting the most unique users. Built-in issue tracking integrations allow developers to take action quickly and track the status of each unique crash through to completion.

New Relic Mobile tracks a number of issues, including these three key performance impacting categories:

- Environmental conditions: Details like the user’s OS version, device type, location in the world, or choice in mobile carrier can lead any mobile app down a rabbit hole. There are endless combinations and many frustrating performance issues can arise simply from the convergence of a certain subset of these scenarios. With New Relic Mobile, key environmental stats are collected about every user session, so when performance issues arise, guesswork is not required. This also aids in prioritization, by identifying the most common environmental scenarios to test for, creating an optimal experience within a unique user base.

- Networking conditions: Communication to and from a mobile app is key to a successful user experience. Things like HTTP errors, network failures, strange or empty response bodies, and throughput all play a role. Unpredictable and unreliable third-party endpoints especially can wreak havoc on an app’s performance. New Relic Mobile monitors real-time HTTP requests to various internal and third-party endpoints, and captures errors, responses, and network failures so that mobile developers know exactly when a service is leading to slow or inferior experiences in their apps.

-  User-driven data and decisions: A user’s journey and the decisions they make as they interact with an app have an uncanny ability to uncover flaws. The sequence of screens displayed, buttons pressed, data entered, or even the speed of scrolling can spell trouble for code. New Relic’s User Interaction Traces can help by providing instant code-level visibility into how an app is performing throughout all user sessions. With the slowest interactions captured and reported, developers can quickly identify the most offending performance issues, isolate the areas of their code that need to be optimized, and spend time improving things that matter.

New Relic will soon deliver a new automated testing solution that can help identify and prevent performance problems before they happen by simulating real-user experiences of a companies’ applications.

Customers will soon be able to build data apps right on top of the New Relic Software Analytics data cloud. Using New Relic’s data cloud and data app platform, users will be able to create custom data apps for others within an organization.