Expanding platform capabilities: Creating new entities from Legacy Systems

Written by Omar Castillo, SRE Engineer - 29th Aug, 2024

Ensuring comprehensive observability across an entire infrastructure is often achieved through teams and tooling. However, legacy systems often pose challenges due to their incompatibility with modern monitoring tools. This article explores a novel solution developed by our Observability team to address this gap by integrating unsupported systems into the New Relic entity ecosystem.

The Challenge

Many organizations rely on SolarWinds to monitor older systems that are not natively supported by New Relic. This disparity in coverage creates visibility blind spots, hindering effective performance management and troubleshooting.

The Solution

To overcome this limitation, our team devised an innovative approach that leverages third-party legacy system data to generate new entities within the New Relic platform.

Rules and templates were designed, tested, and deployed inside the New Relic global platform. This includes a rule definition for golden signals, summary metrics, dashboards, different device types, and the overall new entity definition.

By adopting New Relic’s entity-based logic, previously unsupported systems can now benefit from the full range of observability capabilities offered by the platform.

The core of this solution involves creating custom Flex integrations to extract metrics from SolarWinds and import them into New Relic. These metrics are then enriched with specific tags and attributes to align with New Relic’s entity classification rules.

How it Works

Data Extraction: Flex integrations are configured to pull relevant metrics from the legacy systems.
Data Enrichment: Extracted metrics are enhanced with tags and attributes to match New Relic’s entity categorization criteria.
Entity Creation: New Relic’s entity-based logic automatically processes the enriched metrics, creating new entities for unsupported systems.
Data Visualization: The newly created entities are seamlessly integrated into the New Relic UI, enabling users to leverage dashboards, alerts, and other features for comprehensive monitoring and analysis.

Benefits

Expanded Observability: Gain complete visibility into your entire infrastructure, including previously unsupported systems.
Enhanced Performance Management: Leverage New Relic’s powerful analytics to optimize system performance and identify potential issues.
Improved Troubleshooting: Correlate data from multiple sources to accelerate problem resolution.
Increased Efficiency: Streamline monitoring processes by consolidating data into a single platform.

By combining SolarWinds data with New Relic’s entity-based framework, organizations can achieve unimpeded visibility into their entire infrastructure. This innovative solution empowers IT teams to gain valuable insights from previously inaccessible systems, ultimately improving overall IT operations.

Contact our trusted experts here to schedule a demo or learn more about how we can help you bridge your observability gap.