Engineering excellence transforms how your development teams build, deploy, and maintain software systems. This maturity framework helps you evolve from reactive problem-solving to proactive optimization and security-first practices.
What you'll achieve
Operational efficiency: Optimize infrastructure resource utilization to reduce costs and improve performance across your entire technology stack.
Proactive change management: Integrate deployment tracking with observability to anticipate and prevent issues before they impact users.
Enhanced security posture: Systematically identify and remediate vulnerabilities in your application portfolio to reduce business risk.
Data-driven decisions: Use concrete metrics and scorecard rules to measure progress and guide engineering investments.
How this framework works
This framework provides a structured three-level progression that guides your organization from basic monitoring to advanced engineering practices. Each level builds upon the previous one, ensuring sustainable improvement in your engineering capabilities.
Rather than overwhelming your teams with complex requirements, this approach focuses on incremental improvements that deliver measurable business value at each stage.
Maturity progression model
This three-level framework guides your organization through a systematic journey toward engineering excellence. Each level introduces specific practices and metrics that build upon previous achievements.
Level 1: Reactive - Resource optimization
Goal: Establish efficient infrastructure operations through proactive resource monitoring and optimization.
At this foundational level, you'll focus on understanding and optimizing how your systems use compute resources. This creates the baseline efficiency needed for sustainable growth.
Scorecard rules:
CPU Utilization: Ensures infrastructure entities efficiently use compute resources based on defined CPU usage expectations. Entities failing to meet utilization targets are flagged for optimization.
Memory Utilization: Monitors memory usage efficiency across infrastructure entities. Systems operating below expected memory utilization thresholds require attention to improve resource allocation.
Business impact: Reduced infrastructure costs, improved system performance, and better capacity planning.
Level 2: Proactive - Change management integration
Goal: Integrate deployment tracking with observability to anticipate and prevent change-related issues.
Building on resource optimization, this level adds change visibility to help you understand the relationship between deployments and system behavior.
Scorecard rules:
- Change Tracking: Evaluates whether APM entities emit change events during software releases. This integration provides essential visibility into deployment impact and enables faster issue resolution.
Business impact: Faster incident resolution, reduced deployment risks, and improved team collaboration between development and operations.
Level 3: Mastery - Security and risk management
Goal: Achieve comprehensive security oversight through systematic vulnerability detection and management.
At the mastery level, your organization proactively manages security risks as part of the development lifecycle, ensuring robust protection against emerging threats.
Scorecard rules:
- Service Vulnerabilities: Measures the percentage of APM entities with detected vulnerabilities using New Relic Security. Regular vulnerability assessment and remediation strengthen your overall security posture.
Business impact: Reduced security risks, improved compliance posture, and enhanced customer trust through proactive vulnerability management.
Complementary observability practices
These additional practices enhance your engineering excellence journey by addressing broader aspects of software development and delivery quality:
Development quality management:
- Development quality: Improve code quality through systematic measurement of error rates, code coverage, and development velocity metrics.
Release quality management:
- Release quality: Enhance deployment success rates and reduce release-related incidents through comprehensive release monitoring.
Error optimization:
- Error tracking optimization: Systematically reduce error rates and improve error detection to enhance overall customer experience.
These practices work together with the engineering excellence scorecard rules to create a comprehensive approach to software quality and operational excellence.
Implementation approach
Getting started
Assess your current state: Review your existing monitoring and observability practices to understand where you stand in the maturity model.
Start with Level 1: Begin with resource utilization monitoring to establish the foundation for advanced practices.
Measure and iterate: Use scorecard rules to track progress and identify areas for improvement.
Build incrementally: Progress through levels systematically, ensuring each foundation is solid before advancing.
Success factors
Executive support: Ensure leadership understands the business value and provides necessary resources for implementation.
Cross-team collaboration: Engage development, operations, and security teams in the journey to ensure comprehensive adoption.
Continuous measurement: Regularly review scorecard metrics and adjust practices based on results and organizational changes.
Training and enablement: Invest in team education to ensure effective use of observability tools and practices.
Next steps
Immediate actions
Review the complete framework: Explore the detailed implementation guides for each maturity level to understand requirements and expected outcomes.
Assess your current capabilities: Evaluate your existing monitoring, change management, and security practices against the maturity model.
Define your goals: Identify which maturity level aligns with your organization's current needs and long-term objectives.
Resources and support
- Observability maturity implementation guide: Comprehensive guidance for implementing observability practices
- Engineering excellence scorecard rules: Detailed specifications for each maturity level
- New Relic University: Training resources to develop team expertise
Start with the maturity level that best matches your current capabilities, and progress systematically through the framework to achieve sustainable engineering excellence.