Tag Archives: New Relic

New Relic is bringing in a new CEO as founder Lew Cirne moves to executive chairman role

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At the market close this afternoon ahead of its earnings report, New Relic, an applications performance monitoring company, announced that founder Lew Cirne would be stepping down as CEO and moving into the executive chairman role.

At the same time, the company announced that Bill Staples, a software industry vet, would be taking over as CEO. Staples joined the company last year as chief product officer before being quickly promoted to president and chief product officer in January. Today’s promotion marks a rapid rise through the ranks to lead the company.

Cirne said when he began thinking about stepping into that executive chairman role, he was looking for a trusted partner to take his place as CEO, and he found that in Staples. “Every founder’s dream is for the company to have a long lasting impact, and then when the time is right for them to step into a different role. To do that, you need a trusted partner that will lead with the right core values and bring to the table what the company needs as an active partner. And so I’m really excited to move to the executive chairman role [and to have Bill be that person],” Cirne told me.

New Relic is changing its pricing model to encourage broader monitoring

For Staples, who has worked at large organizations throughout his career, this opportunity to lead the company as CEO is the pinnacle of his long career arc. He called the promotion humbling, but one he believes he is ready to take on.

“This is a new chapter for me, a new experience to be a CEO of a public company with a billion dollar plus value valuation, but I think the experience I have in the seat of our customers, as well as the experience I’ve had at Microsoft and Adobe, very large companies with very large stakes running large organizations has really prepared me well for this next phase,” Staples said.

Cirne says he plans to take some time off this summer to give Staples the space to grow as the leader of the company without being in the shadow of the founder and long-time CEO, but he plans to come back and work with him as the executive chairman moving forward come the fall.

As he step into this new role, Staples will be taking over. “Certainly I have a lot to learn about what it takes to be a great CEO, but I also come in with a lot of confidence that I’ve managed organizations at scale. You know I’ve been part of P&Ls that were many times larger than New Relic, and I have confidence that I can help New Relic grow as a company.”

Hope Cochran, managing director at Madrona Ventures, who is also the chairman of the New Relic Board said that the board fully backs of the decision to pass the CEO torch from Cirne to Staples. “With the foundation that Lew built and Bill’s leadership, New Relic has a very bright future ahead and a clear path to accelerate growth as the leader in observability,” she said in a statement.

The official transition is scheduled to take place on July 1st.

Amid shift to remote work, application performance monitoring is IT’s big moment


By Ron Miller

New Relic acquires Kubernetes observability platform Pixie Labs

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Two months ago, Kubernetes observability platform Pixie Labs launched into general availability and announced a $9.15 million Series A funding round led by Benchmark, with participation from GV. Today, the company is announcing its acquisition by New Relic, the publicly traded monitoring and observability platform.

The Pixie Labs brand and product will remain in place and allow New Relic to extend its platform to the edge. From the outset, the Pixie Labs team designed the service to focus on providing observability for cloud-native workloads running on Kubernetes clusters. And while most similar tools focus on operators and IT teams, Pixie set out to build a tool that developers would want to use. Using eBPF, a relatively new way to extend the Linux kernel, the Pixie platform can collect data right at the source and without the need for an agent.

At the core of the Pixie developer experience are what the company calls “Pixie scripts.” These allow developers to write their debugging workflows, though the company also provides its own set of these and anybody in the community can contribute and share them as well. The idea here is to capture a lot of the informal knowledge around how to best debug a given service.

“We’re super excited to bring these companies together because we share a mission to make observability ubiquitous through simplicity,” Bill Staples, New Relic’s Chief Product Officer, told me. “[…] According to IDC, there are 28 million developers in the world. And yet only a fraction of them really practice observability today. We believe it should be easier for every developer to take a data-driven approach to building software and Kubernetes is really the heart of where developers are going to build software.”

It’s worth noting that New Relic already had a solution for monitoring Kubernetes clusters. Pixie, however, will allow it to go significantly deeper into this space. “Pixie goes much, much further in terms of offering on-the-edge, live debugging use cases, the ability to run those Pixie scripts. So it’s an extension on top of the cloud-based monitoring solution we offer today,” Staples said.

The plan is to build integrations into New Relic into Pixie’s platform and to integrate Pixie use cases with New Relic One as well.

Pixie Labs raises $9.15M Series A round for its Kubernetes observability platform

Currently, about 300 teams use the Pixie platform. These range from small startups to large enterprises and as Staples and Asgar noted, there was already a substantial overlap between the two customer bases.

As for why he decided to sell, Pixie co-founder (and former Google AI CEO Zain Asgar told me that it was all about accelerating Pixie’s vision.

“We started Pixie to create this magical developer experience that really allows us to redefine how application developers monitor, secure and manage their applications,” Asgar said. “One of the cool things is when we actually met the team at New Relic and we got together with Bill and [New Relic founder and CEO] Lou [Cirne], we realized that there was almost a complete alignment around this vision […], and by joining forces with New Relic, we can actually accelerate this entire process.”

New Relic has recently done a lot of work on open-sourcing various parts of its platform, including its agents, data exporters and some of its tooling. Pixie, too, will now open-source its core tools. Open-sourcing the service was always on the company’s roadmap, but the acquisition now allows it to push this timeline forward.

“We’ll be taking Pixie and making it available to the community through open source, as well as continuing to build out the commercial enterprise-grade offering for it that extends the New Relic one platform,” Staples explained. Asgar added that it’ll take the company a little while to release the code, though.

“The same fundamental quality that got us so excited about Lew as an EIR in 2007, got us excited about Zain and Ishan in 2017 — absolutely brilliant engineers, who know how to build products developers love,” Bessemer Ventures General Partner Eric Vishria told me. “New Relic has always captured developer delight. For all its power, Kubernetes completely upends the monitoring paradigm we’ve lived with for decades.  Pixie brings the same — easy to use, quick time to value, no-nonsense approach to the Kubernetes world as New Relic brought to APM.  It is a match made in heaven.”


By Frederic Lardinois

New Relic is changing its pricing model to encourage broader monitoring

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In the monitoring world, typically when you spin up a new instance, you pay a fee to monitor it. If you are particularly active in any given month, that can result in a hefty bill at the end of the month. That leads to limiting what you choose to monitor to control costs. New Relic wants to change that, and today it announced that it’s moving to a model where customers pay by the user instead with a smaller less costly data component.

The company is also simplifying its product set with the goal of encouraging customers to instrument everything instead of deciding what to monitor and what to leave out to control cost. “What we’re announcing is a completely reimagined platform. We’re simplifying our products from 11 to three, and we eliminate those barriers to standardizing on a single source of truth,” New Relic founder and CEO Lew Cirne told TechCrunch.

The way the company can afford to make this switch is by exposing the underlying telemetry database that it created to run its own products. By taking advantage of this database to track all of your APM, tracing and metric data all in one place, Cirne says they can control costs much better and pass those savings onto customers, whose bills should be much smaller based on a this new pricing model, he said.

“Prior to this, there has not been any technology that’s good at gathering all of those data types into a single database, what we would call a telemetry database. And we actually created one ourselves and it’s the backbone of all of our products. [Up until now], we haven’t really exposed it to our customers, so that they can put all their data into it,” he said.

New Relic Telemetry Data. Image: New Relic

The company is distilling the product set into three main categories. The first is the Telemetry Data Platform, which offers a single way to gather any events, logs or traces, whether from their agents or someone else’s or even open source monitoring tools like Prometheus.

The second product is called Full-stack Observability. This includes all of their previous products, which were sold separately such as APM, mobility, infrastructure and logging. Finally they are offering an intelligence layer called New Relic AI.

Cirne says by simplifying the product set and changing the way they bill, it will save customers money through the efficiencies they have uncovered. In practice he says, pricing will consist of a combination of users and data, but he believes their approach will result in much lower bills and more cost certainty for customers.

“It’ll vary by customer so this is just a rough estimate but imagine that the typical New Relic bill under this model will be a 70% per user charge and 30% data charge, roughly, but so if that’s the case, and if you look at our competitors, 100% of the bill is data,” he said.

The new approach is available starting today. Companies can try it with 100 GB single user account.


By Ron Miller

Amid shift to remote work, application performance monitoring is IT’s big moment

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In recent weeks, millions have started working from home, putting unheard-of pressure on services like video conferencing, online learning, food delivery and e-commerce platforms. While some verticals have seen a marked reduction in traffic, others are being asked to scale to new heights.

Services that were previously nice to have are now necessities, but how do organizations track pressure points that can add up to a critical failure? There is actually a whole class of software to help in this regard.

Monitoring tools like Datadog, New Relic and Elastic are designed to help companies understand what’s happening inside their key systems and warn them when things may be going sideways. That’s absolutely essential as these services are being asked to handle unprecedented levels of activity.

At a time when performance is critical, application performance monitoring (APM) tools are helping companies stay up and running. They also help track root causes should the worst case happen and they go down, with the goal of getting going again as quickly as possible.

We spoke to a few monitoring vendor CEOs to understand better how they are helping customers navigate this demand and keep systems up and running when we need them most.

IT’s big moment


By Ron Miller

New Relic snags early stage serverless monitoring startup IOpipe

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As we move from a world dominated by virtual machines to one of serverless, it changes the nature of monitoring, and vendors like New Relic certainly recognize that. This morning the company announced it was acquiring IOpipe, an early-stage Seattle serverless monitoring startup to help beef up its serverless monitoring chops. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

New Relic gets what it calls “key members of the team,” which at least includes co-founders Erica Windisch and Adam Johnson, along with the IOpipe technology. The new employees will be moving from Seattle to New Relic’s Portland offices.

“This deal allows us to make immediate investments in onboarding that will make it faster and simpler for customers to integrate their [serverless] functions with New Relic and get the most out of our instrumentation and UIs that allow fast troubleshooting of complex issues across the entire application stack,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

It adds that initially the IOpipe team will concentrate on moving AWS Lambda features like Lambda Layers into the New Relic platform. Over time, the team will work on increasing support for Serverless function monitoring. New Relic is hoping by combining the IOpipe team and solution with its own, it can speed up its serverless monitoring chops .

As TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois pointed out in his article about the company’s $2.5 million seed round in 2017, Windisch and Johnson bring impressive credentials.

“IOpipe co-founders Adam Johnson (CEO) and Erica Windisch (CTO), too, are highly experienced in this space, having previously worked at companies like Docker and Midokura (Adam was the first hire at Midokura and Erica founded Docker’s security team). They recently graduated from the Techstars NY program,” Lardinois wrote at the time.

The startup has been helping monitor serverless operations for companies running AWS Lambda. It’s important to understand that serverless doesn’t mean that there are no servers, but the cloud vendor — in this case AWS — provides the exact resources to complete an operation and nothing more.

IOpipe co-founders Erica Windisch and Adam Johnson

Photo: New Relic

Once the operation ends, the resources can simply get redeployed elsewhere. That makes building monitoring tools for such ephemeral resources a huge challenge. New Relic has also been working on the problem and released New Relic Serverless for AWS Lambda offering earlier this year.

IOpipe was founded in 2015, which was just around the time that Amazon was announcing Lambda. At the time of the seed round the company had eight employees. According to Pitchbook data, it currently has between 1 and 10 employees, and has raised $7.07 million since its inception.

New Relic was founded in 2008 and raised over $214 million, according to Crunchbase, before going public in 2014. Its stock price was $65.42 at the time of publication up $1.40.

With $2.5M in seed funding, IOpipe brings monitoring to serverless applications

New Relic launches platform for developers to build custom apps


By Ron Miller

New Relic launches platform for developers to build custom apps

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When Salesforce launched Force.com in 2007 as a place for developers to build applications on top of Salesforce, it was a pivotal moment for the concept of SaaS platforms. Since then, it’s been said that every enterprise SaaS company wants to be a platform play. Today, New Relic achieved that goal when it announced the New Relic One Observability Platform at the company’s FutureStack conference in New York City.

Company co-founder and CEO Lew Cirne explained that in order to be a platform, by definition, it is something that other people can build software on. “What we are shipping is a set of capabilities to enable our customers and partners to build their own observability applications on the very same platform that we’ve built our product,” Cirne told TechCrunch.

He sees these third-party developers building applications to enable additional innovations on top of the New Relic platform that perhaps New Relic’s engineers couldn’t because of time and resource constraints. “There are so many use cases for this data, far more than the engineers that we have at our company could ever do, but a community of people who can do this together can totally unlock the power of this data,” Cirne said.

Like many platform companies, New Relic found that as it expanded its own offering, it required a platform for its developers to access a common set of services to build these additional offerings, and as they built out this platform, it made it possible to open it up to external developers to access the same set of services as the New Relic engineering team.

“What we have is metrics, logs, events and traces coming from our customers’ digital software. So they have access to all that data in real time to build applications, measure the health of their digital business and build applications on top of that. Just as Force.com was the thing that really transformed Salesforce as a company into being a strategic vendor, we think the same thing will happen for us with what we’re offering,” he said.

As a proof point for the platform, the company is releasing a dozen open source tools built on top of the New Relic platform today in conjunction with the announcement. One example is an application to help identify where companies could be over-spending on their AWS bills. “We’re actually finding 30-40% savings opportunities for them where they’re provisioning larger servers than they need for the workload. Based on the data that we’re analyzing, we’re recommending what the right size deployment should be,” Cirne said.

The New Relic One Observability Platform and the 12 free apps will be available starting today.

New Relic shifts with changing monitoring landscape


By Ron Miller

New Relic takes a measured approach to platform overhaul

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New Relic, the SaaS applications performance management platform, announced a major update to that platform today. Instead of ripping off the band-aid all at once, the company has decided to take a more measured approach to change, giving customers a chance to ease into it.

The new platform, called New Relic One has been designed to replace the original platform, which was developed over the previous decade. The company says that by moving slowly to the new platform, customers will be able to take advantage of new features that it couldn’t have built on the old platform without having to learn a new a way of working.

Jim Gochee, chief product officer at New Relic says that all of the existing tooling and functionality will eventually be ported over or reimagined on top of New Relic One.”What it is under the covers for us is a new technology stack and a new platform for our offering. We are still running our existing technology stack with our existing products. So we’re [essentially] running two platforms in two stacks in parallel, but all of the new stuff is going to be built on New Relic One over time,” he explained.

By redesigning the existing platform from scratch, New Relic created a new, modern, more extensible model that will allow it to plug in new functionality more easily over time, and eventually even allow customers to do the same thing. For now, it’s about changing what’s happening under the hood and providing a new user experience in a redesigned user interface.

“New Relic One is very pluggable and extensible, which makes it easier for our own teams to build on, and to extend and expand, and also down the road we will eventually get to the point where partners and customers will be able to extend our UI themselves, which is something that we’re very excited about,” he said.

Among the new features is support for AWS Lambda, the company’s serverless offering. It also enables users to search across multiple accounts. It’s not unusual for customers to be monitoring multiple accounts and sub-accounts. With New Relic One, customers can now search across these accounts and find if issues have cascaded more easily.

In a blog post introducing the new platform, CEO Lew Cirne acknowledged the growing complexity of the monitoring landscape, something the new platform has been specifically designed to address.

“Unlike today’s fragmented tools that can deliver a bag of charts and metrics with a bunch of seemingly unrelated numbers, New Relic One is designed to cut through complexity, provide context, and let you see across artificial organizational boundaries so you can quickly find and fix problems,” Cirne wrote.

Nancy Gohring, a senior analyst at 451 Research says this flexibility is a key strength of the new approach. “One of the most important updates here is the reworked data model which allows New Relic to offer customers more flexibility in how they can search the operations data they’re collecting and build dashboards. This kind of flexibility is more important in modern app environments that are more complex and dynamic than they used to be. Everyone’s environment is different and digging for the cause of a problem is more complicated than it used to be,” Gohring told TechCrunch. The new ability to search across accounts should help with that.

She concedes that having parallel platforms is not ideal, but sees why the company chose to go this route. “Having two UIs is never great. But the approach New Relic is taking lets them get something totally new out all at once, rather than spending time gradually introducing it. It will let customers try out the new stuff at their own pace,” she said.

New Relic One goes live tomorrow, and will be available at no additional cost to New Relic subscribers.


By Ron Miller

New Relic acquires Belgium’s CoScale to expand its monitoring of Kubernetes containers and microservices

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New Relic, a provider of analytics and monitoring around a company’s internal and external facing apps and services to help optimise their performance, is making an acquisition today as it continues to expand a newer area of its business, containers and microservices. The company has announced that it has purchased CoScale, a provider of monitoring for containers and microservices, with a specific focus on Kubernetes.

Terms of the deal — which will include the team and technology — are not being disclosed, as it will not have a material impact on New Relic’s earnings. The larger company is traded on the NYSE (ticker: NEWR) and has been a strong upswing in the last two years, and its current market cap its around $4.6 billion.

Originally founded in Belgium, CoScale had raised $6.4 million and was last valued at $7.9 million, according to PitchBook. Investors included Microsoft (via its ScaleUp accelerator), PMV and the Qbic Fund, two Belgian investors.

“We are thrilled to bring CoScale’s knowledge and deeply technical team into the New Relic fold,” noted Ramon Guiu, senior director of product management at New Relic. “The CoScale team members joining New Relic will focus on incorporating CoScale’s capabilities and experience into continuing innovations for the New Relic platform.”

The deal underscores how New Relic has had to shift in the last couple of years: when the company was founded years ago, application monitoring was a relatively easy task, with the web and a specified number of services the limit of what needed attention. But services, apps and functions have become increasingly complex and now tap data stored across a range of locations and devices, and processing everything generates a lot of computing demand.

New Relic first added container and microservices monitoring to its stack in 2016. That’s a somewhat late arrival to the area, New Relic CEO Lew Cirne believes that it’s just at the right time, dovetailing New Relic’s changes with wider shifts in the market.

‘We think those changes have actually been an opportunity for us to further differentiate and further strengthen our thesis that the New Relic  way is really the most logical way to address this,” he told my colleague Ron Miller last month. As Ron wrote, Cirne’s take is that New Relic has always been centered on the code, as opposed to the infrastructure where it’s delivered, and that has helped it make adjustments as the delivery mechanisms have changed.

New Relic already provides monitoring for Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and RedHat Openshift, and the idea is that CoScale will help it ramp up across that range, while also adding Docker and OpenShift to the mix, as well as offering new services down the line to serve the DevOps community.

“The visions of New Relic and CoScale are remarkably well aligned, so our team is excited that we get to join New Relic and continue on our journey of helping companies innovate faster by providing them visibility into the performance of their modern architectures,” said CoScale CEO Stijn Polfliet, in a statement. “[Co-founder] Fred [Ryckbosch] and I feel like this is such an exciting space and time to be in this market, and we’re thrilled to be teaming up with the amazing team at New Relic, the leader in monitoring modern applications and infrastructure.”


By Ingrid Lunden

Instana raises $30M for its application performance monitoring service

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Instana, an application performance monitoring (APM) service with a focus on modern containerized services, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Meritech Capital, with participation from existing investor Accel. This brings Instana’s total funding to $57 million.

The company, which counts the likes of Audi, Edmunds.com, Yahoo Japan and Franklin American Mortgage as its customers, considers itself an APM 3.0 player. It argues that its solution is far lighter than those of older players like New Relic and AppDynamics (which sold to Cisco hours before it was supposed to go public). Those solutions, the company says, weren’t built for modern software organizations (though I’m sure they would dispute that).

What really makes Instana stand out is its ability to automatically discover and monitor the ever-changing infrastructure that makes up a modern application, especially when it comes to running containerized microservices. The service automatically catalogs all of the endpoints that make up a service’s infrastructure, and then monitors them. It’s also worth noting that the company says that it can offer far more granular metrics that its competitors.

Instana says that its annual sales grew 600 percent over the course of the last year, something that surely attracted this new investment.

“Monitoring containerized microservice applications has become a critical requirement for today’s digital enterprises,” said Meritech Capital’s Alex Kurland. “Instana is packed with industry veterans who understand the APM industry, as well as the paradigm shifts now occurring in agile software development. Meritech is excited to partner with Instana as they continue to disrupt one of the largest and most important markets with their automated APM experience.”

The company plans to use the new funding to fulfill the demand for its service and expand its product line.


By Frederic Lardinois

GitLab raises $100M

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GitLab, the developer service that aims to offer a full lifecycle DevOps platform, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series D funding round at a valuation of $1.1 billion. The round was led by Iconiq.

As GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told me, this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $145.5 million, will help it enable its goal of reaching an IPO by November 2020.

According to Sijbrandij, GitLab’s original plan was to raise a new funding round at a valuation over $1 billion early next year. But since Iconiq came along with an offer that pretty much matched what the company set out to achieve in a few months anyway, the team decided to go ahead and raise the round now. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub earlier this year helped to accelerate those plans, too.

“We weren’t planning on fundraising actually. I did block off some time in my calendar next year, starting from February 25th to do the next fundraise,” Sijbrandij said. “Our plan is to IPO in November of 2020 and we anticipated one more fundraise. I think in the current climate, where the macroeconomics are really good and GitHub got acquired, people are seeing that there’s one independent company, one startup left basically in this space. And we saw an opportunity to become best in class in a lot of categories.”

As Sijbrandij stressed, while most people still look at GitLab as a GitHub and Bitbucket competitor (and given the similarity in their names, who wouldn’t?), GitLab’s wants to be far more than that. It now offers products in nine categories and also sees itself as competing with the likes of VersionOne, Jira, Jenkins, Artifactory, Electric Cloud, Puppet, New Relic, and BlackDuck.

“The biggest misunderstanding we’re seeing is that GitLab is an alternative to GitHub and we’ve grown beyond that,” he said. “We are now in nine categories all the way from planning to monitoring.”

Sijbrandij notes that there’s a billion-dollar player in every space that GitLab competes it. “But we want to be better,” he said. “And that’s only possible because we are open core, so people co-create these products with us. That being said, there’s still a lot of work on our side, helping to get those contributions over the finish line, making sure performance and quality stay up, establish a consistent user interface. These are things that typically don’t come from the wider community and with this fundraise of $100 million, we will be able to make sure we can sustain that effort in all the different product categories.”

Given this focus, GitLab will invest most of the funding in its engineering efforts to build out its existing products but also to launch new ones. The company plans to launch new features like tracing and log aggregation, for example.

With this very public commitment to an IPO, GitLab is also signaling that it plans to stay independent. That’s very much Sijbrandij’s plan, at least, though he admitted that “there’s always a price” if somebody came along and wanted to acquire the company. He did note that he likes the transparency that comes with being a public company.

“We always managed to be more bullish about the company than the rest of the world,” he said. “But the rest of the world is starting to catch up. This fundraise is a statement that we now have the money to become a public company where we’re not we’re not interested in being acquired. That is what we’re setting out to do.”


By Frederic Lardinois

New Relic shifts with changing monitoring landscape

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New Relic CEO Lew Cirne was feeling a bit nostalgic last week when he called to discuss the announcements for the company’s FutureStack conference taking place tomorrow in San Francisco. It had been 10 years since he first spoke to TechCrunch about his monitoring tool. A lot has changed in a decade including what his company is monitoring these days.

Cirne certainly recognizes that his company has come a long way since those first days. The monitoring world is going through a seismic shift as the ways we develop apps changes. His company needs to change with it to remain relevant in today’s market.

In the early days, they monitored Ruby on Rails applications, but gone are the days of only monitoring a fixed virtual machine. Today companies are using containers and Kubernetes, and beyond that, serverless architecture. Each of these approaches brings challenges to a monitoring company like New Relic, particularly the ephemeral nature and the sheer volume associated with these newer ways of working.

‘We think those changes have actually been an opportunity for us to further differentiate and further strengthen our thesis that the New Relic way is really the most logical way to address this.” He believes that his company has always been centered on the code, as opposed to the infrastructure where it’s delivered, and that has helped it make adjustments as the delivery mechanisms have changed.

Today, the company introduced a slew of new features and capabilities designed to keep the company oriented toward the changing needs of its customer base. One of the ways they are doing that is with a new feature called Outlier Detection, which has been designed to address changes in key metrics wherever your code happens to be deployed.

Further, Incident Context lets you see exactly where the incident occurred in the code so you don’t have to go hunting and pecking to find it in the sea of data.

Outlier Detection in action. Gif: New Relic

The company also introduced developer.newrelic.com, a site that extends the base APIs to provide a central place to build on top of the New Relic platform and give customers a way to extend the platform’s functionality. Cirne said each company has its own monitoring requirements, and they want to give them ability to build for any scenario.

In addition, they announced New Relic Query Language (NRQL) data, which leverages the New Relic GraphQL API to help deliver new kinds of customized, programmed capabilities to customers that aren’t available out of the box.”What if I could program New Relic to take action when a certain thing happens. When an application has a problem, it could post a notice to the status page or restart the service. You could automate something that has been historically done manually,” he explained.

Whatever the company is doing it appears to be working It went public in 2014 with an IPO share price of $30.14 and a market cap of $1.4 billion. Today, the share price was $103.65 with a market cap of $5.86 billion (as of publishing).


By Ron Miller

Intermix.io looks to help data engineers find their worst bottlenecks

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For any company built on top of machine learning operations, the more data they have, the better they are off — as long as they can keep it all under control. But as more and more information pours in from disparate sources, gets logged in obscure databases and is generally hard (or slow) to query, the process of getting that all into one neat place where a data scientist can actually start running the statistics is quickly running into one of machine learning’s biggest bottlenecks.

That’s a problem Intermix.io and its founders, Paul Lappas and Lars Kamp, hope to solve. Engineers get a granular look at all of the different nuances behind what’s happening with some specific function, from the query all the way through all of the paths it’s taking to get to its end result. The end product is one that helps data engineers monitor the flow of information going through their systems, regardless of the source, to isolate bottlenecks early and see where processes are breaking down. The company also said it has raised seed funding from Uncork Capital, S28 Capital, PAUA Ventures along with Bastian Lehman, CEO of Postmates, and Hasso Plattner, Founder of SAP.

“Companies realize being data driven is a key to success,” Kamp said. “The cloud makes it cheap and easy to store your data forever, machine learning libraries are making things easy to digest. But a company that wants to be data driven wants to hire a data scientist. This is the wrong first hire. To do that they need access to all the relevant data, and have it be complete and clean. That falls to data engineers who need to build data assembly lines where they are creating meaningful types to get data usable to the data scientist. That’s who we serve.”

Intermix.io works in a couple of ways: first, it tags all of that data, giving the service a meta-layer of understanding what does what, and where it goes; second, it taps every input in order to gather metrics on performance and help identify those potential bottlenecks; and lastly, it’s able to track that performance all the way from the query to the thing that ends up on a dashboard somewhere. The idea here is that if, say, some server is about to run out of space somewhere or is showing some performance degradation, that’s going to start showing up in the performance of the actual operations pretty quickly — and needs to be addressed.

All of this is an efficiency play that might not seem to make sense at a smaller scale. the waterfall of new devices that come online every day, as well as more and more ways of understanding how people use tools online, even the smallest companies can quickly start building massive data sets. And if that company’s business depends on some machine learning happening in the background, that means it’s dependent on all that training and tracking happening as quickly and smoothly as possible, with any hiccups leading to real-term repercussions for its own business.

Intermix.io isn’t the first company to try to create some application performance management software. There are others like Data Dog and New Relic, though Lappas says that the primary competition from them comes in the form of traditional APM software with some additional scripts tacked on. However, data flows are a different layer altogether, which means they require a more unique and custom approach to addressing that problem.


By Matthew Lynley