Six reasons you should build with New Relic and AWS

Everyone has an idea. But there’s a major difference between having an idea and being able to build and scale it.

At New Relic, we’ve always had a soft spot for the builders. After all, many of us have built and scaled startups ourselves (like IOpipe, Pixie Labs, and CodeStream), played a role in our growth from the early days of monitoring Ruby web applications, or served as advisors for early stage startups.

With this in mind, we’ve partnered with AWS Activate and launched New Relic for Startups on the Activate console to help startup engineering teams and technical founders build and scale software faster and with confidence—from idea to IPO. 

Early-stage startups who are existing AWS Activate members can select the New Relic exclusive offer in the console to get full access to the New Relic cloud-based observability platform, to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize all AWS services. We also recently announced our expansion with Zendesk and Carta to provide early stage startups with generous credits and discounts for Carta’s equity management and company-building solutions and Zendesk’s customer service, engagement, and sales CRM solution.

If you’re not already a member, you can sign up for AWS Activate today to get access to this offer and other startup tools, resources, content, and access to AWS Activate credits. 

To help you get started, here are six things all AWS Activate startup founders and engineers can achieve with New Relic and AWS.

1. Start with access to the same dev tools used by world-class engineering orgs.

We believe every engineer should have access to best-in-class observability tooling from the start. While all developers can build a functional app with a repo and an S3 bucket, many early-stage startups might feel the pressure to compromise on their tooling choices due to implementation complexity or price.

Whether you’re building with an engineering team of two or 20, the 30+ capabilities of New Relic give you a centralized debug workbench, with real-time, in-depth analysis of errors, transactions, metrics, logs, and more. With applied intelligence baked in and quick access to contextual log data for root-cause analysis for any event, you can drill down into the meta details for any performance issues before they affect your users. More importantly, you can instrument all of your telemetry from anywhere—even third-party services—at any time in one secure cloud.

2. Avoid the stress of expensive monitoring tools.

Spend less money on tooling so you can invest in R&D, hiring engineering talent, and good coffee for the office. Contrary to popular belief, monitoring your apps and systems doesn’t have to be an exercise in deciphering a mix of hosts, traces, logs, and metrics, and sampling data that results in blind spots. You don't have to patch together different tools and data sets for logs, infrastructure monitoring, and tracing. Optimize your spending on tooling.

With New Relic, you start on our Standard plan with:

• 100 gigabytes of free data ingest per month.
• Unlimited hosts and CPUs.
• Default data retention.
• Unlimited free basic users with access to data ingestion, querying, dashboards, and alerts.
• One free full platform user with access to the 30+ capabilities of New Relic, including APM, log management, errors tracking, and more. 

With our transparent core pricing metrics, you can pay for more data (for example $0.35/GB/month for data ingested beyond 100 GB/month) or more users as you grow and scale. 

Plus, there are perks to being part of AWS Activate. We’ve partnered with other key players to bring generous credits and discounts for eligible startups across Carta’s equity management and company-building solutions, and Zendesk’s customer service, engagement, and sales CRM solution. That way you can focus on building new features while preserving your burn rate.

3. Get instant monitoring for your entire AWS environment.

Whether it’s visualizing and debugging AWS Lambda invocation errors or containers on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), startups can visualize nearly any AWS service within New Relic. Integrations include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon API Gateway—and the list goes on.

The best part? You can troubleshoot all of these AWS services alongside the rest of their distributed environment, whether it’s other third-party services and APIs or simply components hosted somewhere else.

As an example, let’s say your startup is using Amazon EKS to containerize and run a checkout service with a lot of different components. You received a Slack notification that one of your containers is running out of memory based on predefined alerts provided by New Relic.

In just two clicks, you can go from a critical, red pod in production to the meta details—and now down to the log level. You can see that there’s a stress process causing the issue, and you can fix it by modifying the code or changing your memory thresholds. And you can do the same type of troubleshooting flow across nearly any AWS service.

4. Easily connect with the tools you already love.

We know that many engineers rely on many tools to monitor the health of their systems, which can make it difficult to gain end-to-end observability without having to toggle between multiple solutions. 

To help combat this issue of tool sprawl and data silos, we partner with leading technology companies to build integrations to make it easy to visualize, monitor, and act on all your data in a single observability platform. 

You can find all of our integrations in New Relic Instant Observability (I/O), an open ecosystem of more than 775+ free, prebuilt quickstarts that help you start monitoring your system in minutes. These quickstarts bundle necessary building blocks for instrumenting, monitoring, and acting on signals from your telemetry data, wherever it comes from. 

Tools you need for CI/CD, security, machine learning operations, data analytics, project management, as well as API, network, application, and streaming monitoring from companies like Cloudflare, Netlify, Postman, Snyk, Jenkins, CircleCI, Databricks, Cribl, Kentik, and more are now all at your fingertips. With these integrations, your teams can better onboard without having to learn new tools, collaborate utilizing all of these tools in a centralized platform, and focus on delivering better customer experiences and on security, governance, risk, and compliance.

5. Establish DevOps and data-driven engineering practices early and seamlessly.

In a startup, shipping and being responsible for code in production is often everyone’s problem. Outages and other indicators of poor customer experiences can be the core difference between revenue loss and employee attrition and being considered a leader and attracting top talent in the industry. Building and shipping fast often means using managed services to abstract away infrastructure management. But when things go wrong, it can be a lot trickier to detangle the issue.

With all of your metrics, events, logs, and traces living in one managed database—and powerful queries and custom dashboards to access this data—you’ll get real-time visibility throughout the software cycle. You’ll be able to measure the impact of every change and understand how your users are interacting with your product. You can use this data to influence your feature planning and decisions, to fuel innovation, long-term reliability, and system scalability.

With distributed tracing and logs-in-context from New Relic in place from Day 0, your team can quickly isolate which service or call is causing latency, and then drill down to the log level in just a couple of clicks to get the meta details so that you can solve the issue.

6. Get started without a sales conversation.

You don’t always have time to talk to a salesperson, especially when you’re busy fundraising or debugging an issue. Now you can sign up using only your name and email, solve your issue, and explore features on your own schedule with your own data.

With New Relic, startups can sign up directly from the AWS Activate Console, and our guided install helps you auto-instrument your AWS services starting directly from the command line.

No demo or sales conversation needed.