A Technical Q&A with Senior Director of Application and Support at American Academy of Pediatrics.
In your own words, what does your organization do and what is your main mission?
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is the largest professional association for pediatricians in the United States. It runs the largest pediatric publishing program in the world and offers continuing medical education to over 67,000 general pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists, pediatric surgical specialists, and trainees.
The mission of the AAP is to attain optimal physical, mental, and social health and well-being for all infants, children, adolescents, and young adults. To accomplish this mission, the AAP shall support the professional needs of its members.
The AAP is celebrating more than 90 years of commitment to this mission.
What are some of your biggest tech challenges?
Keeping up with the rate and pace of change in the technology space.
What are the challenges you face in your job at the moment?
Ensuring consistency and ease of access to services is a priority for Members, customers, and staff. AAP continues to digitally transform and adapt to increasing reliance on data and technology. It is paramount that our lean technical teams can stay focused on project initiatives supporting organizational needs and we are best enabled to streamline incident investigation and can efficiently identify, resolve, and prevent problems when issues do arise.
What was your favorite feature in New Relic that you learnt about during your Pro Bono experience?
The Workloads capability is a favorite feature. We find it provides the ability to preview the health of all our prod-priority applications in one page and the options to link dashboards to various metrics. NRQL use has also allowed us to fine tune our alert conditions and cut down on the noise from overly sensitive alerts. Added granularity to error messaging and alerts has allowed us to recognize the source of issues and corrective actions or next steps with more ease and less effort.
How was your application running before New Relic?
Our applications were running smoothly, but when issues arose it required time to investigate the root causes. The new features in New Relic and our participation in the Pro Bono program has allowed us to make better use of workloads, understand configuration features and alert further, and automate a significant portion of this investigation, allowing us to simplify and streamline usability for developers to help solve issues more efficiently.
What are five things you learnt about New Relic that you didn’t know about prior to Pro Bono?
- Workloads Feature
- Microsoft SQL Server integration
- Optimizing Alerts
- Service levels.
- Vulnerability Management.
Are you using vulnerability management?
No as it’s not included as part of our New Relic Data Plan.
Are you using distributed tracing?
We have distributed tracing enabled for all our .NET and .NET Core applications in both pre-production and production environments. This allows our organization to trace the path of a single transaction or request as it travels through various services and components of a distributed system. This provides end-to-end visibility into the entire transaction flow.
Are you using dashboards? If so, which ones and what do they monitor?
We have been using multiple dashboards for our monitoring and analysis including the Infrastructure Overview and Log Analysis dashboards. Apart from these pre-built dashboards, we also have been using custom dashboards to track top 5 database call durations, APM error count monitoring to track error rates and logs specific to our prod-priority applications. We are also newly implementing and reviewing the Microsoft SQLOn-Host Integration with Query Plans to consolidate application developer triage efforts from other database monitoring platforms.
Are you using any synthetic monitors as part of your deployment lifecycle? If so, can you talk about how they’re used in pre-production and production environments?
Synthetic monitors are part of our deployment lifecycles. AAP uses scripted API, ping and simple browser monitors to monitor specific performance metrics and integration points within applications. We are actively using these alerts in production environments to monitor our services and their availability. These monitors ensure the reliability and performance of our applications with advanced alerting.
Have you been able to quantity any improvements from New Relic (e.g. time to ship to production, costs saved, volunteer hours saved)
New Relic Monitoring saves us time by automating alerts, enabling early issue detection, facilitating faster troubleshooting, reducing downtime and scaling with organizational growth.
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