New Relic Case Studies Cost Reduction and Improved Monitoring: A Case Study on Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS)

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	Cost Reduction and Improved Monitoring: A Case Study on Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) New Relic

Cost Reduction and Improved Monitoring: A Case Study on Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS)

New Relic

Technology Category	Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application Sensors - Temperature Sensors
Applicable Industries	Cement Construction & Infrastructure
Applicable Functions	Product Research & Development
Use Cases	Behavior & Emotion Tracking Leakage & Flood Monitoring
Services	System Integration
Challenge	Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), a company that grows nutritious food via automated growth towers, faced a significant challenge in maintaining the reliability of their system. The nature of their product demanded a high degree of reliability, as any outages could lead to the death of their crops. As a small organization, they needed insight into the system's reliability, especially as they scaled and handled larger volumes of data. Initially, they used Application Insights as a part of Microsoft Azure, but it wasn't well integrated with the amount of data they gathered due to their heavy use of Kubernetes. They considered open source solutions, but with only three people on the team, managing that would have turned into a full-time job. They needed a SaaS solution that adhered to open standards, allowed monitoring with logging and tracing, and was Kubernetes-native. Read More
About Customer	Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) is a small organization that grows nutritious and tasty food via automated growth towers. They heavily rely on technology and data to ensure the reliability of their system, as any outages could lead to the death of their crops. As they scale up and handle larger volumes of data, they need to maintain insight into the system's reliability while keeping costs under control. They heavily use Kubernetes and were initially using Application Insights as a part of Microsoft Azure, but found it wasn't well integrated with the amount of data they gathered. Read More
Solution	IGS landed on New Relic, a software analytics company, as their solution. New Relic's adoption of open source, like OpenTelemetry and integrations with Prometheus, made it a great fit for IGS. The instrumentation phase was easy, with about 90% of the work being done by simply adding the APM agent into the container. For more specialized libraries, a few bits of custom instrumentation were added, but it took almost no time at all. New Relic also uses standard approaches for gathering logs for a given language, which made the process even smoother. IGS also utilized New Relic's rich API and Terraform provider to automate the creation of dashboards, workload views, and customizations or alerts for given environments. This allowed them to have these alerts as part of the code review, creating a standardized workflow across both software engineering and the site. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application

Sensors - Temperature Sensors

Applicable Industries

Cement

Construction & Infrastructure

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Behavior & Emotion Tracking

Leakage & Flood Monitoring

Services

System Integration

Challenge

Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), a company that grows nutritious food via automated growth towers, faced a significant challenge in maintaining the reliability of their system. The nature of their product demanded a high degree of reliability, as any outages could lead to the death of their crops. As a small organization, they needed insight into the system's reliability, especially as they scaled and handled larger volumes of data. Initially, they used Application Insights as a part of Microsoft Azure, but it wasn't well integrated with the amount of data they gathered due to their heavy use of Kubernetes. They considered open source solutions, but with only three people on the team, managing that would have turned into a full-time job. They needed a SaaS solution that adhered to open standards, allowed monitoring with logging and tracing, and was Kubernetes-native.

About Customer

Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) is a small organization that grows nutritious and tasty food via automated growth towers. They heavily rely on technology and data to ensure the reliability of their system, as any outages could lead to the death of their crops. As they scale up and handle larger volumes of data, they need to maintain insight into the system's reliability while keeping costs under control. They heavily use Kubernetes and were initially using Application Insights as a part of Microsoft Azure, but found it wasn't well integrated with the amount of data they gathered.

Solution

IGS landed on New Relic, a software analytics company, as their solution. New Relic's adoption of open source, like OpenTelemetry and integrations with Prometheus, made it a great fit for IGS. The instrumentation phase was easy, with about 90% of the work being done by simply adding the APM agent into the container. For more specialized libraries, a few bits of custom instrumentation were added, but it took almost no time at all. New Relic also uses standard approaches for gathering logs for a given language, which made the process even smoother. IGS also utilized New Relic's rich API and Terraform provider to automate the creation of dashboards, workload views, and customizations or alerts for given environments. This allowed them to have these alerts as part of the code review, creating a standardized workflow across both software engineering and the site.

Impact #1	The adoption of New Relic has had a significant impact on IGS's operations. They have been able to do proactive monitoring, preventing issues before they occur. They can now identify performance degradation or an increase in errors that might highlight some underlying instability. Monitoring at scale has become a non-issue, allowing them to focus on areas that deliver value to their customers and development team. The rich New Relic integration ecosystem has also enabled them to streamline their production route. They can now tie a log to a single trace and see it all together into a single view, minimizing additional cognitive load. They've also customized their alerts to improve productivity, and the use of Terraform for automation has standardized their workflow across both software engineering and the site.

Impact #1

The adoption of New Relic has had a significant impact on IGS's operations. They have been able to do proactive monitoring, preventing issues before they occur. They can now identify performance degradation or an increase in errors that might highlight some underlying instability. Monitoring at scale has become a non-issue, allowing them to focus on areas that deliver value to their customers and development team. The rich New Relic integration ecosystem has also enabled them to streamline their production route. They can now tie a log to a single trace and see it all together into a single view, minimizing additional cognitive load. They've also customized their alerts to improve productivity, and the use of Terraform for automation has standardized their workflow across both software engineering and the site.

Benefit #1	IGS achieved a 58% reduction in spend with New Relic.
Benefit #2	The mean time to recovery (MTTR) has gone down by 80%.
Benefit #3	The time it takes for a feature to move from the first line of code through to customer availability reduced from an average of 22 days to 4 days.

Benefit #1

IGS achieved a 58% reduction in spend with New Relic.

Benefit #2

The mean time to recovery (MTTR) has gone down by 80%.

Benefit #3

The time it takes for a feature to move from the first line of code through to customer availability reduced from an average of 22 days to 4 days.

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Overview

Cost Reduction and Improved Monitoring: A Case Study on Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS)

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit