By Nate Rich, Principal Engineer at Foulk Consulting
Don’t Just ‘Lift and Shift’: A Smarter Strategy for Migrating to New Relic
When it’s time to migrate to a new observability platform like New Relic, the temptation to find a shortcut is strong. Many organizations look for a magic script to simply “lift and shift” their existing dashboards and alerts from a legacy tool. While this seems like the fastest path, our experience shows it often leads to longer adoption times, lower-quality solutions, and a lot of frustration.
Instead of looking for shortcuts, a more strategic approach ensures you harness the full power of your new platform and achieve your monitoring goals efficiently.
Start with “Why,” Not “What”
The most effective first step in any migration is to review your current monitoring content—dashboards, alerts, and reports—and ask a simple question: “Why was this built in the first place?”
The goal isn’t to replicate every single dashboard. It’s to deduce the original functional requirements. What business or operational question was this alert designed to answer? What problem was this dashboard trying to solve? By understanding the underlying purpose, you can have a much more efficient conversation with stakeholders about what is truly needed on the new platform. This process helps filter out outdated or irrelevant monitoring that has accumulated over time and builds a consensus on the requirements that matter today.
Embrace the New Relic Methodology
Every observability platform has its own philosophy and unique strengths. Trying to force methods from your old tool (whether it’s Datadog, Dynatrace, or another) onto New Relic is a recipe for a clunky, inefficient setup. It’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Once you’ve agreed on the functional requirements, the next step is to develop solutions that leverage the native methodology of New Relic. This means using its data models, query language (NRQL), and visualization tools as they were intended. This approach not only results in a more powerful and streamlined monitoring solution but also makes it easier for your teams to maintain and scale in the future.
Socialize and Standardize Before Production
A successful migration isn’t just a technical exercise; it’s a people-centric one. Once the new content is developed in New Relic, it’s crucial to have stakeholders review and provide feedback. This collaborative loop is key to gaining acceptance.
This milestone is critical. Before anything is deployed to Production, the stakeholders and the intended consumers of the monitoring—be it SREs, developers, or operations teams—should be completely familiar with the new alerts and dashboards. They need to understand what they are seeing, what it means, and what the expectations for a response are. This “socialization” phase prevents confusion and ensures that when a real-world incident occurs, your team is ready to act decisively.
Chasing the shortcut of a content conversion script might seem appealing, but it’s a path that is often longer and leads to a less effective destination. By focusing on requirements, embracing the new platform’s strengths, and ensuring stakeholder buy-in, you can execute a migration that delivers real value from day one.
Plan Your Migration with Confidence
Facing your own observability migration challenge? Let our experts help you build a strategy that gets it right the first time. Contact Foulk Consulting today to start the conversation.
