How a Nonprofit stays one step ahead using New Relic.
Q&A with Eric Matthias from the American Association of Pediatrics
Q: Can you please tell us a bit about yourself, your role and how you came to work at the American Association of Pediatrics?
A: Hi, I’m Eric Matthias. I am the Senior Director of Application Development. I have been at the AAP for over 10 years. I’ve been working with technology for over 25 years. I started my career in public traded companies and wanted to go somewhere that made a difference. The AAP does that and you can see the effect it has on helping children every day. It is good to be working with technology and helping individuals help children instead of making a CEO rich. It is a great mission and great place to work.
Q: What is AAP’s main mission?
A: The American Academy of Pediatrics is dedicated to promoting optimal health and well-being for every child as well as helping to ensure that Academy members practice the highest quality health care and experience professional satisfaction and personal well-being.
The Academy achieves this mission through provision of consistently high levels of value to member pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and surgical specialists, trusted advice to children and families, and professional development opportunities for pediatric leadership. Indeed, as a mission-driven membership-based organization, enhancing child health is at the heart of the Academy’s work. Its strengths include a strong emphasis on policy, advocacy, and education; serving as a public face for children’s health and the profession; and a mission-driven culture. These services are driven by the Academy’s core values and commitments as an organization
Q: How do you think about Observability?
A: It is very important to know how your systems function at all times and to get alerted to react when an issue arises. The worst thing to do is to get informed by your users that there is a problem which you did not know about. There are many different ways to observe that may not constitute a known problem but can become a problem if not fixed. This is where observability thrives.
Q: What was your favorite feature in New Relic that you learnt about during your Pro Bono experience?
A: Workloads
Q: What are five things you learnt about New Relic that you didn’t know about prior to Pro Bono?
- Workloads
- How to implement logging
- Ways to improve alerts
- Taking advantage of different dashboards
- Database and network modules
Q: If you were to recommend New Relic to a colleague or fellow developer what would you say to them?
A: New Relic is a great solution to monitor your application environment and gives you a lot of data to make decisions on improving your ecosystem. It has many different options to help in monitoring issues, alerting failures, and managing your workload ecosystem.
