Change tracking transforms incident response and service reliability by providing visibility into when and how your systems change. This scorecard rule ensures your deployment activities are properly instrumented with New Relic change events, enabling you to correlate deployments with system behavior and resolve issues faster.
Why change tracking matters
Faster incident resolution: When issues occur, change events help you quickly identify if a recent deployment caused the problem, dramatically reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR).
Proactive risk management: Understanding deployment patterns and their impact enables you to identify risky changes before they cause widespread issues.
Service delivery insights: Change tracking provides data-driven insights into deployment success rates, rollback frequency, and overall delivery pipeline health.
Cross-team collaboration: Shared visibility into deployments improves communication between development, operations, and support teams during incidents.
How this rule works
This rule evaluates whether your APM entities are emitting change events as part of your software deployment process. Change events create a timeline of deployments that can be correlated with performance metrics, errors, and alerts.
Success criteria: APM entities pass when they regularly emit change tracking events that correspond to their deployment activities, enabling comprehensive change visibility across your application portfolio.
Rule definition
This scorecard rule measures the integration of deployment activities with observability practices across your application portfolio.
Measurement criteria
Evaluation scope: All APM entities within your New Relic account Success requirement: Regular emission of change tracking events corresponding to deployment activities Assessment period: Ongoing evaluation of change event presence and frequency
Understanding change events
What change events capture:
- Deployment timestamps and duration
- Application version information
- Deployment environment details
- Release metadata and deployment user information
How change events enhance observability:
- Create deployment markers on performance charts and dashboards
- Enable correlation between deployments and system behavior changes
- Provide context for incident investigation and root cause analysis
- Support deployment success rate calculations and trend analysis
The importance of systematic change tracking
Incident correlation: Change events enable rapid identification of deployment-related issues, often reducing investigation time from hours to minutes.
Deployment safety: Visibility into change patterns helps identify high-risk deployment practices and implement safeguards.
Operational insights: Change tracking data reveals deployment frequency, success rates, and impact patterns across your application portfolio.
Compliance and auditing: Change events provide an audit trail of system modifications for compliance and governance requirements.
Implementation strategies
When your scorecard shows missing change events, these strategies will help you establish comprehensive change tracking:
1. Assess your current deployment landscape
Identify deployment methods:
- Catalog all deployment tools and processes across your organization (CI/CD pipelines, manual deployments, automated releases)
- Document deployment frequency and patterns for each application
- Understand which teams own different deployment processes
Evaluate existing instrumentation:
- Review which applications currently emit change events
- Identify gaps in change tracking coverage
- Assess the quality and completeness of existing change event data
2. Implement change event instrumentation
CI/CD pipeline integration:
- Add New Relic change tracking to your continuous integration and deployment pipelines
- Use the New Relic CLI or REST API to record deployments automatically
- Include relevant metadata such as version numbers, commit hashes, and deployment environment
Manual deployment tracking:
- Establish processes for recording manual deployments and hotfixes
- Create scripts or tools to simplify change event submission for manual processes
- Train teams on the importance of recording all system changes
Deployment automation:
- Integrate change tracking into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments
- Add change events to container orchestration deployments (Kubernetes, Docker)
- Include database migration and configuration change tracking
3. Enhance change event data quality
Comprehensive metadata capture:
- Include deployment user information for accountability
- Record deployment duration and success/failure status
- Capture rollback information when deployments are reverted
Environment-specific tracking:
- Implement change tracking across all environments (development, staging, production)
- Use environment-specific tags and identifiers
- Maintain consistency in change event format across environments
Version and release information:
- Include semantic version numbers and release notes
- Link change events to source control commits and pull requests
- Capture feature flags and configuration changes
4. Build change-aware workflows
Incident response integration:
- Train incident response teams to review recent change events during investigations
- Create runbooks that include change timeline review as a standard step
- Implement automated correlation between incidents and recent deployments
Deployment safety practices:
- Use change event data to implement deployment gates and safety checks
- Create alerts for deployment frequency anomalies or failure patterns
- Establish rollback procedures that update change tracking accordingly
Performance monitoring correlation:
- Configure dashboards to overlay change events on performance metrics
- Set up alerts that trigger when performance degrades after deployments
- Use change events to segment performance analysis by deployment periods
Implementation guidance
Setting up change tracking infrastructure
- Choose implementation approach: Decide between API-based integration, CLI automation, or webhook-based solutions
- Configure authentication: Set up proper API keys and permissions for change event submission
- Establish data standards: Define consistent metadata formats and naming conventions
- Test implementation: Verify change events appear correctly in New Relic interfaces
Building organizational adoption
Team training and enablement:
- Educate development teams on the value of change tracking for incident response
- Provide documentation and examples for implementing change events
- Create self-service tools and templates to simplify change event submission
Process integration:
- Incorporate change tracking requirements into deployment checklists
- Update deployment procedures to include change event submission
- Establish change tracking as a standard practice in development workflows
Monitoring and improvement:
- Track change event submission rates across teams and applications
- Identify and address gaps in change tracking coverage
- Continuously improve change event data quality and usefulness
Advanced change tracking practices
Automated correlation:
- Implement automated detection of deployment-related performance issues
- Create alerts that combine change events with error rate or performance threshold breaches
- Use machine learning to identify patterns between specific types of changes and system behavior
Change impact analysis:
- Analyze the relationship between deployment frequency and system stability
- Measure deployment success rates and identify improvement opportunities
- Use change tracking data to optimize deployment timing and practices
Cross-team visibility:
- Create shared dashboards that show deployment activity across multiple teams
- Implement change notifications to relevant stakeholders
- Use change events to improve communication during planned maintenance windows
Important considerations
Deployment diversity: Different teams and applications may use varied deployment methods. Design flexible change tracking approaches that accommodate multiple deployment patterns while maintaining data consistency.
Cultural adoption: Change tracking requires organizational commitment beyond technical implementation. Focus on demonstrating value through improved incident response and deployment visibility to encourage adoption.
Data quality vs. coverage: Balance comprehensive change tracking with data quality. It's better to have accurate change events for critical applications than incomplete or inaccurate data across all applications.
Privacy and security: Ensure change event metadata doesn't expose sensitive information. Implement appropriate access controls and data sanitization for change tracking data.
Integration complexity: Change tracking implementation complexity varies based on your deployment toolchain. Start with high-impact applications and expand coverage gradually rather than attempting organization-wide implementation simultaneously.
Common challenges and solutions
Inconsistent adoption: Address by providing clear value demonstrations, easy-to-use tools, and gradual rollout with success showcases.
Technical integration difficulties: Solve through comprehensive documentation, example implementations, and dedicated support for complex deployment environments.
Data overload: Manage by implementing filtering and aggregation strategies, focusing on actionable change event data rather than capturing every possible detail.
Next steps
After implementing this scorecard rule:
- Complete Level 1 resource optimization by ensuring CPU Utilization and Memory Utilization rules are implemented
- Progress to Service Vulnerabilities for Level 3 engineering excellence practices
- Implement change-driven alerting that correlates deployments with system behavior changes
- Explore the complete Engineering Excellence framework for systematic engineering improvement
Resources for implementation
Technical documentation:
- New Relic Change Tracking API for detailed implementation guidance
- CI/CD integration examples for common deployment tools
- Change tracking best practices for organizational adoption strategies