Case Studies RunKeeper Reduces Operational Costs and Time Spent Troubleshooting with New Relic

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	RunKeeper Reduces Operational Costs and Time Spent Troubleshooting with New Relic

RunKeeper Reduces Operational Costs and Time Spent Troubleshooting with New Relic

Technology Category	Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries	Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions	Product Research & Development Quality Assurance
Use Cases	Predictive Maintenance Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services Data Science Services
Challenge	As RunKeeper increased in popularity, application performance became increasingly difficult to predict. The company’s engineering team now stands at 20 people and is organized into several subgroups to focus on key features. The challenge was how to go from a handful of developers to multiple teams who are deploying features for more than 27 million users. Before using New Relic, RunKeeper already had a number of performance monitoring tools in place. However, a significant gap remained in the company’s ability to understand the root cause of emerging issues. Read More
About Customer	RunKeeper is a mobile fitness platform that leverages the location technology in smartphones to help runners and other fitness enthusiasts track, measure, and improve their fitness. Launched in 2008 and available on iOS and Android, this ‘personal trainer in your pocket’ now boasts more than 27 million users worldwide. RunKeeper’s backend runs primarily on a Java app server. Clusters of Apache Tomcat web servers operate behind a HAProxy load balancer, and the data layer is a combination of PostgreSQL and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). All caching is done with Redis; Jenkins enables continuous deployment. On the frontend, a lightweight JSON API facilitates communication between RunKeeper.com, the company’s mobile apps, and third-party servers. Read More
Solution	When Bondi discovered New Relic, he recognized its potential to deliver the technical insight his team still lacked. “We started by using New Relic for Server Monitoring,” he says. “It immediately helped us solve some of our server scaling issues. We understood where the bottlenecks were, right down to the line of code.” He also appreciated New Relic’s unprecedented insight into third-party analytics. “If we push a change and S3 is having a bad day, or different geographic regions are having issues on the Facebook API, it’s important for us to understand the source of those problems,” says Bondi. “Instead of digging into our own system, we can address the issue with the S3 folks or we can put our various contingencies into place.” Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Applicable Industries

Healthcare & Hospitals

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Data Science Services

Challenge

As RunKeeper increased in popularity, application performance became increasingly difficult to predict. The company’s engineering team now stands at 20 people and is organized into several subgroups to focus on key features. The challenge was how to go from a handful of developers to multiple teams who are deploying features for more than 27 million users. Before using New Relic, RunKeeper already had a number of performance monitoring tools in place. However, a significant gap remained in the company’s ability to understand the root cause of emerging issues.

About Customer

RunKeeper is a mobile fitness platform that leverages the location technology in smartphones to help runners and other fitness enthusiasts track, measure, and improve their fitness. Launched in 2008 and available on iOS and Android, this ‘personal trainer in your pocket’ now boasts more than 27 million users worldwide. RunKeeper’s backend runs primarily on a Java app server. Clusters of Apache Tomcat web servers operate behind a HAProxy load balancer, and the data layer is a combination of PostgreSQL and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). All caching is done with Redis; Jenkins enables continuous deployment. On the frontend, a lightweight JSON API facilitates communication between RunKeeper.com, the company’s mobile apps, and third-party servers.

Solution

When Bondi discovered New Relic, he recognized its potential to deliver the technical insight his team still lacked. “We started by using New Relic for Server Monitoring,” he says. “It immediately helped us solve some of our server scaling issues. We understood where the bottlenecks were, right down to the line of code.” He also appreciated New Relic’s unprecedented insight into third-party analytics. “If we push a change and S3 is having a bad day, or different geographic regions are having issues on the Facebook API, it’s important for us to understand the source of those problems,” says Bondi. “Instead of digging into our own system, we can address the issue with the S3 folks or we can put our various contingencies into place.”

Impact #1	RunKeeper has been able to reduce various operational expenses.
Impact #2	The RunKeeper team can also now spend more time focusing on users, rather than building tools to make its mobile apps run faster, which translates into a major reduction in operational expenses as well.
Impact #3	New Relic helps RunKeeper maximize productivity. “We no longer spend an hour just looking for the source of a problem,” says Bondi. “New Relic allows us to get to the source of a problem much faster—no more than 10 minutes—and quickly fix it.”

Impact #1

RunKeeper has been able to reduce various operational expenses.

Impact #2

The RunKeeper team can also now spend more time focusing on users, rather than building tools to make its mobile apps run faster, which translates into a major reduction in operational expenses as well.

Impact #3

New Relic helps RunKeeper maximize productivity. “We no longer spend an hour just looking for the source of a problem,” says Bondi. “New Relic allows us to get to the source of a problem much faster—no more than 10 minutes—and quickly fix it.”

Benefit #1	With that insight, we were able to trim a lot of waste and save up to 4x on our hosting bill.
Benefit #2	As a result, we cut down our DOM loading time by up to 7x.
Benefit #3	RunKeeper has also been able to improve its server response time by more than 80%.

Benefit #1

With that insight, we were able to trim a lot of waste and save up to 4x on our hosting bill.

Benefit #2

As a result, we cut down our DOM loading time by up to 7x.

Benefit #3

RunKeeper has also been able to improve its server response time by more than 80%.

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Overview

RunKeeper Reduces Operational Costs and Time Spent Troubleshooting with New Relic

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit