Implementing application performance management for improved site reliability 

Southwestern-based company that markets sports equipment and student achievement accessories, including spirit awards, class rings and jewelry, and yearbook products.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A Southwestern-based company specializing in sports equipment and student achievement products partnered with CleanSlate to enhance the reliability and performance of its 24×7 digital applications. Seasonal demand and system instability had begun impacting customer experience and brand reputation. CleanSlate implemented a robust Application Performance Management (APM) solution using New Relic’s suite of monitoring tools. This provided full-stack visibility—from infrastructure to application health—and empowered the organization to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive performance optimization, resolving key stability issues and reducing outage frequency.

challenges

Our client’s digital business offers applications that are accessed 24×7 by users across North America. Like many companies, they needed greater visibility into their production systems to appropriately manage workloads and to identify application performance issues or metrics. In this particular case, seasonal workloads and application issues drove variances in system performance and application stability, which in turn had an impact on the client’s business and reputation. In some cases, issues were reported by the customer before the client had knowledge that an issue existed. Visibility into system performance was imperative to ensure issues were quickly identified and remediated.

Solutions

Leveraging CleanSlate’s expertise with Site Reliability and IT Operations, the following solution was proposed and implemented:

  • New Relic Cloud Application Performance Monitor (APM) to help bring visibility to the internal performance metrics of the client’s applications. New Relic APM provided a complete suite of monitoring capabilities including support for application profiling, troubleshooting, and workload analysis.
  • The New Relic Infrastructure Management module was also implemented to provide complete visibility of the AWS Cloud Infrastructure. This allowed fine tuning of the Docker Containers deployed within AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) to ensure applications are properly scaled up/down according to user activity.
  • CleanSlate implemented New Relic Synthetics to monitor the health of application services from various locations across the country. This validated application health and pinpointed geographic locations that may be experiencing issues.

Results

Improved system stability by identifying and resolving key application performance issues, including challenges with memory allocation errors that were occurring during peak hours. Identified and resolved database performance and connection issues that were causing production outages. Optimized cloud compute costs by having data available to fine-tune auto-scaling rules of the container clusters.

Ultimately, the solution gave the company visibility to identify issues before the customer and shift the mentality from reactive to proactive troubleshooting.

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