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Nic Benders shared thisThirty years ago, we were obsessed with the scrum of hardware trade shows. Today, it’s the sheer complexity of the AI stack. Yet dashboards today still look a lot like the ones that we built back when COMDEX was king. Most Observability tools are built for a reality that no longer exists. We’re moving past the era of just spotting problems. If your tool doesn't help you solve the problem autonomously, is it really helping you scale, or is it just another source of noise? On February 24, we’re hosting New Relic Advance to talk about the shift from insight to autonomy, and a bit of a back to the future moment for APM as we evolve the technology into the AI era. Sign up here: https://bit.ly/45Mf6Ry
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Nic Benders shared thisI had a great time with Cory O'Daniel on the Platform Engineering Podcast recently. We talked about when New Relic (first) showed me I was an idiot, how the world changes with AI writing software now, and what even is Observability? Plus: Cory gets menaced by bees! Good times. https://lnkd.in/gwhvHg8T
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Nic Benders shared thisOur latest 2025 Observability Forecast for Financial Services confirms a harsh reality for modern engineering teams: technical complexity is now the biggest barrier to achieving full-stack visibility. When outages cost $1.8 million per hour, it’s a liability. To solve this, about half of the FinServ industry is deploying AI monitoring, treating observability as a proactive system of intelligence rather than a reactive dashboard. As firms navigate a dual-speed reality by balancing the agility of fintech challengers against the rigid security requirements of legacy systems, two architectural priorities have become non-negotiable: – AI-Driven Correlation: With 38% of #FinServ leaders citing AI as a primary driver for observability, the shift from "searching for logs" to "acting on insights" is well underway. – Tool Consolidation: High-performing teams are moving away from fragmented toolsets that create data silos and toward unified platforms that offer a single source of truth. Get all the technical benchmarks in the full report: https://lnkd.in/gQJGq9ti #FinServ2025 Observability Forecast for Financial Services2025 Observability Forecast for Financial Services
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Nic Benders shared thisThink telcos are "old skool"? Not in AI monitoring. We broke out the data from our 2025 Observability Report and it had some surprises. Telecommunications providers are outpacing the global average in AI adoption. 74% of telco organizations have deployed AI monitoring, far exceeding the global average of 54%. This shift is critical as outage costs rise—hitting $2 million per hour for telcos and $1.6 million per hour for IT organizations. The payoff is clear: 58% of telcos see observability delivering an ROI of 2x or more. https://lnkd.in/gEzdupgg2025 Telecommunications & Technology Observability Report2025 Telecommunications & Technology Observability Report
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Nic Benders shared thisI'm heading back to Re:Invent again! Which always makes me think about this Wired magazine piece from thirty (!!!) years ago about the annual Comdex event in Las Vegas: > For one week Comdex convenes a socioeconomic nation - the future of advanced capitalism - which many of us only read hints of in the business section of our morning papers. > Don't think Comdex is just a carnival of booths - it's a war zone. The companies are going at it banner to banner, promotion to promotion, image to image. Comdex is distant memory now, but that "war zone" really lives on at the Re:Invent Expo Hall. If you're there, shoot me a DM or come say "hi" at the booth. We'll be Booth 265 this year. #AWSreinvent (And yes, the title of the Wired piece was "Moronic Inferno". I think about it every year.)
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Nic Benders shared thisI want to call out two interesting things about this story from our Distributed Tracing team: The first is the secret advantage of being a software company that makes software for people who make software. Have a problem running the platform at scale? Let's add a feature to help, and help our customers along the way too. Got an idea for a new feature? Try it out internally and see how it works on a live production environment before it ever goes to the first external customer. Market research and user studies are fine, but there is just no substitute for picking up a tool yourself and using it to solve a real world problem to tell you what's just okay versus what is great. No report can tell you that. You have to feel it. That means that stories like this also reveal how we think about our own platform and what we think "great" means. For us, business impact, not technical tasks, are the measures of success. The second thing is that people, especially engineers, are often quick to create a dichotomy between cost efficiency and reliability. Again and again though, I've seen the opposite. When you dive into inefficient resource usage, you will almost always find that the same issues that waste your money are also making your system less stable. Identifying, tracking, and solving those high-utilization spots will save you money AND keep the pager quiet.Nic Benders shared thisHow do we make our observability platform more efficient? By using it ourselves. Our team recently tackled an interesting challenge inside New Relic: how to make our own distributed tracing pipeline leaner and faster without sacrificing reliability. It started as a small experiment; a “what if” question about how we store and compress data in Redis; and turned into a major optimization that cut memory and network usage dramatically. The best part? Every insight came from the same platform our customers use to monitor and optimize their own systems. Learn how we did it in our latest blog post: https://lnkd.in/g3UGB88e
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Nic Benders shared thisHad a ton of fun with Ryan Donovan on the SO podcast talking about the journey from _observability_ to _understandability_ recently. Why does understandability matter? It turns out that we've built this whole beautiful stack of abstractions that we live in now, but that underlying complexity didn't really go away. Everyone who runs production systems at scale knows that sometimes you've got to be willing to dive back into that stack and find out what is really happening. It's not enough for our tools to hide the complexity, or even to show us the complexity. Tools need to help us _understand_ it all.Nic Benders shared this🎙️ New Relic's Chief Technical Strategist Nic Benders joins the show to discuss the complexity crisis in software, the importance of going beyond observability into understandability, and demystifying AI's opacity so developers have more control. https://lnkd.in/etqfkweZ
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Nic Benders shared thisFor those who haven't had the privilege of visiting Morgantown or going to WVU, the PRT is a wacky packet-switched autonomous transit system that connects the disparate parts of campus. You go into the station, hit a button, and then wait for a car going to your destination. Growing up in Morgantown, I had no idea that this wasn't just how everything worked, and I remember being greatly disappointed when visiting a big city for the first time and finding out that subways have _drivers_ and that it was up to you to figure out which trains went which places. Madness!Nic Benders shared thisFor 50 years, the PRT has connected our campuses with our community. 💛💙 Launched in 1975 as a U.S. Department of Transportation experiment, it became the first automated people-mover of its kind and a symbol of Mountaineer ingenuity! Read more! https://go.wvu.edu/4gamp
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Nic Benders shared thisHowdy all! Talk is extremely cheap these days, but data is what counts. The 2025 New Relic State of Observability for Media and Entertainment report just dropped, with insights into the true cost of downtime as well as what value that observability delivers for media and entertainment organizations. So let's dig in! The big headline is that responses confirm that stakes are higher than ever: a high-impact outage now costs organizations an average of $2 million per hour, and takes around 40 minutes to resolve. Other key takeaways from the report include: * 51% of respondents achieved a strong 2–3x return on investment from observability * AI adoption and an increased focus on security are the top factors driving companies to adopt observability * 50% of leaders report that observability is key to hitting their technical KPIs But there is a lot more than this. The research also highlights how intelligent observability enables smarter, predictive decision-making, eliminates interruptions, and pushes digital operations to new heights. Enough of my yapping though. Download the report and see the data yourself - https://lnkd.in/gPPb97FB #observability #mediainnovation
Nic Benders replied to a comment
1mo
Jim Curtis Haha, thanks. I wasn't sounding good, that's for sure. I had a kicking head-cold the day before and was wondering if I sounded all stuffed up. It took 10 seconds of watching the recording to confirm my suspicion.... Ah well, win some, lose some.
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Nic Benders reacted on thisNic Benders reacted on thisJustin Biegel, Ian Pye, and I wanted to share the news that Daniel Ellis passed away peacefully this weekend after a multi-year struggle with the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma. Dan was our first CTO, but is also a “pre-founder” at Kentik. I have known Dan since he started an ISP in PA in 1992 and Kentik would not be a company today if it wasn’t for Dan. He convinced me of the need for modern network analytics and in particular replacing Arbor and Deepfield, and then was a force of nature for years willing our product into existence with energy, perseverance, leadership, and constant laptop use at all hours, most especially including at meals. There are many of us at Kentik and our customers who Dan touched particularly deeply, and he was a builder of ISPs, Netflix delivery, and Apple satellite tech, and prolific in hobbies and personal impact as well. Once we learn more about the family’s plans to honor his memory, we will look at a time as well for the Kentik community to share stories and celebrate his life and impact. Dan at work in the think tank:
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