Federal Tech Talk

Implementing a new IDEA

Bob Withers, senior director Public Sector at New Relic, joins host John Gilroy on this week's Federal Tech Talk to discuss how his company is helping federal a...

John Gilory

February 3, 2020 5:12 pm

1 min read

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Fed Tech Talk’s audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

This week on Federal Tech Talk, host John Gilroy speaks with Bob Withers, senior director, Public Sector at New Relic. The company motto is “Deliver More Perfect Software.” Well, the federal government is a great place to assist in improving software development.

Head shot of Bob Withers — Bob Withers, senior director, Public Sector, New Relic

The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act is a federal initiative that attempts to make federal websites provide the same citizen experience as commercial sites. Today’s interview is a discussion on how to accomplish that task.

Withers argues that the best approach is to have complete transparency into what is going on in a federal agency website. The terms he chooses to describe this capability is “observability.” From the perspective of New Relic, a federal information professional can’t evaluate any system without knowing system dependencies and a myriad of other data. Observability goes beyond monitoring because it allows for deeper knowledge of system inadequacies as well as giving alerts to system conditioning.

For example, a cloud vendor may make a claim about performance once a system is moved to the could. If one relies on diagnostic capabilities of the cloud provider, you may be misled. When a system like New Relic is deployed, one can get a precise measurement of speed so a valid comparison can be made.