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 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.

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.