Business uptime is a critical metric for any organization, reflecting the reliability and availability of services that directly impact customer satisfaction and business results. The New Relic Observability platform provides a comprehensive suite of tools and practices to enhance business uptime through improved service delivery. This document outlines a maturity progression model that leverages observability practices to drive business-focused results, specifically targeting business uptime.
Maturity progression model
The maturity progression model is designed to guide organizations through a structured journey from reactive to proactive and, ultimately, mastery over levels of observability. Each level is characterized by specific practices and metrics that you will find in the related scorecard to help measure and improve business uptime.
Level 1: Reactive approach
At the reactive level, organizations respond to incidents as they occur, often without prior warning. The focus is on establishing basic alert mechanisms to ensure that issues are detected promptly. The following rules are used to evaluate the effectiveness of a reactive approach:
- Infrastructure Alert Coverage: Ensures alert definitions are present for INFRA-HOST or INFRA-KUBERNETES-POD entities. A lack of alerts results in a failure score.
- Service Delivery Alert Coverage: Checks for alert definitions on APM-APPLICATION, BROWSER-APPLICATION, MOBILE-APPLICATION, or SYNTH-MONITOR entities. Missing alerts lead to a failure score.
- Critical Alert Coverage: Evaluates a 7-day sample of alert incidents per target entity to determine the percentage due to critical versus warning violations.
- Alert Noise: Assesses incidents over a 7-day period to determine if a specific policy is responsible for more than 14 incidents during that time.
Level 2: Proactive approach
The proactive level involves anticipating potential issues before they impact business operations. Organizations at this stage use observability practices to continuously improve service delivery. The following rules and metrics are evaluated:
- Service Level Coverage: Assesses whether entities have defined Service Level Indicators (SLIs) during the latest entity harvest. Defined SLIs indicate proactive monitoring.
- Alerts Mean Time To Close: Measures the time taken to close incidents, with resolutions under 30 minutes considered successful. This metric reflects the efficiency of incident management processes.
- APM Criticality Tag Coverage: Evaluates the assignment of criticality ratings (low, medium, high) to entities, highlighting their importance for business operations.
Level 3: Mastery
At the mastery level, organizations achieve direct business benefits from their observability practices, transcending mere incident remediation. The focus is on service level attainment:
- Service Level Attainment: Evaluates the latest service level compliance score for each defined SLI. A success rate above 95% is considered successful, indicating high reliability and uptime.
Observability practices
Observability practices are the actionable components of the maturity model, enabling organizations to realize the potential value of the New Relic platform. These practices include:
- Alert quality management (AQM): Reduces alert fatigue by focusing on alerts with true business impact. AQM improves response times and increases awareness of critical events, leading to higher uptime and availability.
- Service level management (SLM): Standardizes data into a universal language, improving communication between IT and business stakeholders. SLM enhances reliability by reducing business-impacting incidents and their duration.
Next steps
Organizations are encouraged to explore New Relic's resources and guides to tailor their observability journey according to their specific needs. By leveraging the maturity progression model and observability practices, businesses can unlock the full potential of the New Relic platform and achieve their uptime goals.