As I reflect on the past year 2021, I have to say that I am very thankful for all the nice and passionate people I met and opportunities I had to make connections – most virtually, but quite a few also in person. It is still a tough time for everyone to be in, but the most important thing is to stay positive and optimistic about the future. As many of my close friends and connections on various social channels know, 2021 has also been a year of change for me personally.

Postman is a great tool to showcase how APIs work. The collections for commercetools are very sophisticated and provide all the details you need in order to demo their capabilities. However, sometimes it is just great to know alternative ways to demo certain aspects. Especially from a developer perspective, Visual Studio Code seems to be the de-facto standard nowadays. VS Code has a huge ecosystem of extensions available … and one of these is REST Client created by Huachao Mao.

I am working with a global enterprise on rolling out the entire New Relic platform capabilities across their organization. The technical teams are happy and very confident in using the New Relic One platform. They have pretty much all the information they need and get all the way from high-level overviews of their entire stack down to code-level views. However, for management and executive leadership it is hard to get an overview themselves.

It was back in 2019 at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando when I discovered a new project referred to as Distributed Application Runtime, or Dapr for short. This immediately caught my attention and Mark Russinovich did an amazing job presenting this to the audience. Dapr is quite an interesting project for me in many ways. First of all, software architecture is near and dear to my heart and Dapr solves a lot of the challenges developers typically face when designing and implementing applications.

How-To: Set-up New Relic to collect and observe metrics, traces and logs from Dapr and the underlying applications. Enable Dapr metrics and logs with New Relic Kubernetes integration for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and application traces using OpenTelemetry. Prerequisites Azure Kubernetes Service kubectl An installation of Dapr on Kubernetes Perpetually free New Relic account, 100 GB/month of free data ingest, 1 free full access user, unlimited free basic users Enable New Relic Kubernetes integration The Kubernetes integration monitors worker nodes.