NR cert unlocked — Certified in New Relic Full Stack Observability
New Relic university for Observability education
What is New Relic (NR) and NR University (NRU)
New Relic is a software analytics and performance monitoring platform that helps businesses monitor and optimize the performance of their applications and infrastructure, ensuring reliability, efficiency, availability, user experience and some other -ilities required for a software system to be well “observable”.
The company behind New Relic, New Relic Inc is doing a superb job on the observability education front. There are numerous generic or very technical blog posts, where people can read, understand and even become experts on the topic.
New Relic blog posts can be found at the company’s own blog:
However, the observability education does not stop there. Videos, certifications, badges can be found at New Relic’s University page. More information in the video below:
There are learning paths for all levels, consisted of two different streams, the New Relic Foundations and the Observability Practitioner. Both streams are consisted of well made videos. The Instructor-Led webinars is the other option, where any New Relic account holder (you can register for free) can login, select and register. A mistake I made was registering for East US timezone and was impossible to attend in the late evening hours in the UK, where I am based currently. So, make sure you pay attention to the timezone :)
My new role at Informa
I recently joined Informa Tech as a Cloud Platform engineer leading the Observability activities. One of my responsibilities is working closely with New Relic to improve on our efficiency, availability, reliability, user experience across the estate of companies and websites within Informa Group. That means, I will be more and more involved with New Relic and how the company makes the most of it. My starting point? The New Relic university.
NR knowledge steps
Back to the certification topic, it took me 2 working days to slowly watch all three videos of the New Relic Foundations stream — it can be done in 3 hours if you like. By completing this stream I received my Observability Foundations badge! (The badge arrived in my mailbox 2 days later).
After completing the New Relic Foundations stream, I jumped straight and registered for the Full Stack Observability Practitioner Certification. That was not straight forward, as I received a 60% mark the first time — 80% is the passing mark. The 2nd time, after studying a bit more and understanding where my issues were, I got 79%! So close :)
I finally passed with 85% and that was the 3rd attempt. In total, it took me attempts to understand the areas I needed to improve. To clarify this better, the test consists of 29 questions of different types as shown below:
- type in the missing word
- multiple choice (one correct answer)
- multiple choice (multiple or all correct answers) — this can be checkmarks or radio buttons.
- connect the right and left icons i.e. match the right terminology
For more info and useful preparation tips
My next steps
And for next steps, I am planning to obtrain the Observability Practitioner badge, which requires watching and understanding the next stream of videos i.e. the Observability Practitioner.
I have also scheduled multiple Instructor-led events, this time in my timezone… :)
Lastly, once the knowledge is consolidated and I have spent time with the platform and how we, as a company, deal with our New Relic instrumentation/configuration, I will aim to pass the New Relic Certified Performance Pro certification. There is also the programmability certification in case anyone is interested in building a New Relic One application from scratch, deploy a New Relic One application or add custom visualization to dashboards among other goals.
To summarise, New Relic university provides an extensive and detailed amount of blogposts, videos, events & certifications that can give a good understanding, not only in the platform itself, but also the entire topic of Observability, which is becoming a must for many organisations. I hope this information has helped anyone who has these aspirations and needs for themselves or their organisation.
About me
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