Paul Kiddie @pkiddie @ttl_engineering

New Relic in action at Trainline

What we do

What we do

Train companies

Small business

Mobile Apps Consumer Website

Services

Some vitals

•  ~40 Environments •  over 1000 servers •  over 100 products

•  Windows/.NET •  New Relic .NET agent / Server Monitor •  Automation is key!

Before New Relic

•  Application errors logged to disk •  Production support team look at logs – After production issue identified from customer

reports – After platform release to check change in patterns

•  Ad-hoc and reactive •  Errors difficult to reproduce as usually hours/

days after the event and out of context

Introducing New Relic at Trainline

•  Zero capital outlay, subscription model, up and running in an hour

•  Identified a product: leisure website •  Continuous delivery pipeline with blue/green

deployments to all environments •  Needed solution for continuous monitoring

Introducing New Relic at Trainline

•  New Relic agent / server monitor part of application server image

•  Deployed with high security enabled •  Out of the box – Near-real time error logging / alerting – Application / end-user performance – Deployment markers – User funnels

Immediate value

•  Error rate as a team key performance indicator

•  Drive down error rate through weekly health checks

•  Remediate top three errors by adding directly to dev team backlog

•  Stack traces visible and actionable by developers without further analysis

https://api.newrelic.com/v2/applications/{application_id}/metrics/data.json

Taking it further

•  Roll out New Relic across all machines in all environments – New Relic installed on base images for new

machines – Else use SCCM to manage installation

Application/server monitoring built in and zero effort for dev teams

Taking it further

ü Custom attributes

•  Mimic high security mode in newrelic.config– Create and deploy Chocolatey package through Chef /

SCCM •  Observations: – New Relic .NET agent doesn’t check in to verify

highSecurity setting matches once it has started

<highSecurityenabled=“true”/>

More value…

•  Use custom attributes to augment Transaction and PageView events with more information to form other business metrics.

•  Phoenix’s real-time payments dashboard – Spread of payment methods – Effect of payment outages

How Trainline uses New Relic

•  Monitoring/Production Support for near real time running health of system

•  Product owners home in and use funnels to prioritise product effort and spend

•  Developers get rapid feedback on new features

•  Management get a holistic view of the system through the map feature

What we’d like to see we’ll be seeing soon

ü Javascript errors in Insights ü node.js application errors in Insights ü Better Javascript stack traces

•  Per application retention period in Insights •  Full .NET async support

What’s next

•  More custom attributes! •  Develop, run and monitor Node web apps in

production – use New Relic node.js agent – different deployment model, bundle agent/config

with the app

•  AWS migration.