Observing Dapr applications with New Relic One

Created: Jan 31, 2021

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. Its portable, event-driven runtime makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices applications that run on the cloud or edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

How-To: Set-up New Relic to observe Dapr and it's applications

Created: Nov 21, 2020

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. In Azure Kubernetes Service, master nodes are managed by Azure and abstracted from the Kubernetes platforms.

Microsoft Ignite - Azure announcements and more

Created: Dec 02, 2019

Just recently I attended Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft’s annual flagship technology conference with a focus on cloud and developers. The key theme this year was around “Tech Intensity” that Satya also talked about on LinkedIn earlier this year. Here is a quote from the LinkedIn post:

There are two aspects to tech intensity: First, every organization will need to be a fast adopter of best-in- class technology, and equally important, they will need to build their own unique digital capabilities, which starts with workers who are deeply knowledgeable about the latest technology. I think of tech intensity as being an equation – (tech adoption) ^ tech capabilities = tech intensity – and as a company Microsoft is focused on providing the inputs to help our customers solve it.

Fun Project: Amazon Alexa Skill for New Relic Insights

Created: Nov 03, 2017

As a fun project in some spare time, I recently worked on a way to tell Amazon Alexa how to talk to New Relic Insights and retrieve some high-level information about an account. I was just curious on what it would take to get Alexa to access our Insights API with a voice command and Alexa to speak out some result of this query.

You typically start by creating an Amazon developer account and register a new Alexa Skill with the Alexa Skills Kit.

APM with Microsoft .NET Core on Azure

Created: Sep 20, 2017

One of the things I am very interested in is the .NET stack and especially the .NET Core platform. In this blog post I want to briefly highlight what it takes to get a sample .NET Core application up and running on Azure and how to use New Relic’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to monitor this application.

Please note: while I am writing this, the latest version of .NET Core SDK is .NET Core 2.0 Preview 2; dependent upon how you get the SDK, there is already a preview 3 of the .NET Core CLI out there, but this is currently not supported on Azure. You can check for support by using a Developer Console (Developer Tools –> Console of an Azure App Service) within the Azure portal and navigate to D:\Program Files (x86)\dotnet\sdk.

New Relic's APM demo on IBM BlueMix

Created: Aug 07, 2017

Last week, we had the chance to present at a local Cloud Foundry Meetup in Stuttgart/Germany and the key topic was around IBM BlueMix (BM).

My idea was to show and demo something around New Relic and BM. Due to my ignorance, I actually did not know that IBM BM is also based upon the open source platform Cloud Foundry (CF). Interestingly enough, I was involved in quite some CF engagements in my previous life and so I knew what it would take to get a so-called Spring-Boot type application (https://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/) up and running on this platform. It basically follows the same pattern of using the CF-CLI (Command Line Interface) to deploy an app.

Azure Mobile Center ... and the art of debugging :-)

Created: Mar 30, 2017

As a side project, I recently worked on creating a mobile app for Android (and iOS to be completed). To be honest, the development effort was quite straight forward. The development stack focused on Xamarin, because I do not know a thing about creating a native app for Android nor iOS. But, I do know C# … so, for me this was a natural choice :-)

My knowledge in the area of Xamarin was quite limited and I did not create an app for Android or iOS before. However, the path from idea to prototyping was really smooth. There are a ton of kickstart packages out there and the documentation is amazing. You’ll find tons of articles, knowledge base and other posts that are really helpful.

What the heck is a parser-combinator?

Created: Feb 28, 2017

Background and Basics

In a recent project engagement, we were assigned the job to migrate a COBOL-based mainframe application to a new environment. The core theme specifically for this project follows a re-hosting approach. The reasoning for this type of approach is agreed upon with the customer mainly due to time and cost.

Of course, the scope and effort for such a transformation is quite huge and there are many tasks involved for the complete application to run on a completely different platform. Some of the activities include:

Re-architect applications for the cloud

Created: Feb 07, 2017

The path towards cloud-native applications is being adopted by more and more companies. For green-field applications this is a natural choice to architect your applications in a way so that they can be developed, deployed and operated in a cloud environment. This of course could mean on-prem, hybrid or public cloud.

When thinking about your heritage applications and your desire to modernize those, a cloud migration isn’t typically an easy thing to do. Not primarily because of technical reasons, but typically because they exist for a reason and in many cases these applications are mission-critical. Once you made a transformation decision and you created a business case, the next step is to come up with a suitable roadmap for the application. In a previous post, I described the major approaches of such a transformation. In my opinion there is only one suitable way if you truly want to leverage cloud-native concepts and make use of benefits from a cloud deployment … and that is a re-architecture.

What’s so important about Asymmetrical Transformation?

Created: Jan 30, 2017

As a business technology architect helping clients transform their applications, I sometimes feel more like a software archeologist. It is very interesting to see how heterogeneous the technology landscape is and how diverse it is being used at customers of all size and industry sector. But, there is one common question that we see throughout our engagements: “How can we transform this heritage to a future state?” and “Can you help us keep what’s important, but make it easier to manage?”.