If content is king in the digital age, then Scripps Networks Interactive presides over

a very large realm—one populated by an array of lifestyle television networks

(including HGTV, Food Network, Travel Channel, and more) along with associated

interactive businesses.

Across its various global sites, Scripps Networks scales to deliver content to millions

of visitors each month. This means that when a problem occurs—a video hiccups

or content fails to load—the issue tends to spread quickly. As Mark Kelly, director

of cloud and infra-structure services architecture for Scripps Networks, explains,

“When a small problem suddenly extends to 20 million people, it becomes a big

problem very fast. So trying to find the memory leaks or code effects that might

be the culprits becomes a top priority.”

Migrating away from an on-premise environment had also become a top priority

for Scripps Networks, which wanted to gain the cost savings and flexibility—

not to mention easy setup and rock-solid reliability—afforded by cloud-based

delivery of applications and infrastructure.

Thus, when Scripps Networks began contemplating a migration to the cloud with

Amazon Web Services (AWS), it turned to New Relic to help ensure application

performance before, during, and after the migration.

Paving the way to the cloudWhile Scripps Networks today operates in a multi-cloud environment, a few years ago

it was still very much a typical enterprise IT shop—with typical enterprise IT problems.

Back then IT was lucky if it was able to deliver new services or infrastructure

Scripps Networks Interactive Keeps the Digital Content Flowing

INDUSTRYMedia

LOCATIONKnoxville, Tenn.

EMPLOYEES3,500

USE CASEOptimize performance and improve

customer experience across media

company’s varied digital properties

PRODUCTS USEDNew Relic APM, New Relic Insights,

New Relic Infrastructure, New Relic

Synthetics, New Relic Mobile

WHY NEW RELICProvides a single easy-to-use, tightly

integrated solution for monitoring

application and infrastructure

performance in a multi-cloud,

hybrid-cloud environment

HIGHLIGHTS• Eased cloud migration by ensuring

application performance before,

during, and after

• Provided single-pane-of-glass

monitoring for multi-cloud

environment

• Reduced service delivery time from

weeks to minutes

• Streamlined troubleshooting across

environments, applications, and devices

Customer Case Study

within a month of their request. Knowing something had to change, the media

company formed a team to evangelize cloud services and to help influence internal

staff to adopt different technologies.

After deciding on AWS, Kelly and team then started looking at the applications that

Scripps Networks would be migrating to the cloud. To achieve its goal of making

everything simple and correct up front, the media company would need to evaluate

application performance and identify and eliminate any problems before migration

began. But first the team had a problem of its own to address: tool sprawl.

At the time, Scripps Networks had not just one monitoring tool but 50 to 100 of them.

Says Kelly, “We had a mind-boggling amount of tools and not enough expertise

or knowledge to keep everybody aware of them. We knew it was time to simplify.”

Making troubleshooting a breezeAfter evaluating monitoring tools from a half-dozen vendors, Kelly and team chose

New Relic. Not only were they impressed by the application performance

monitoring provided by New Relic APM, they were delighted to find a partner

whose solutions were so tightly integrated with AWS, and whose products were

so easy to install and roll out that Scripps Networks could begin tapping their

value immediately.

Now, instead of having scads of tools, the media company

could consolidate to just four or five. “By combining all those

technologies, we reduced delivery times from four to six weeks

to 15 to 20 minutes today,” says Kelly. “And we’re not just

talking about simple stacks. We’re talking about stacks that were

standing up load balancers, standing up queuing services,

and standing up to 30 to 40 instances. Now we’re able to do

that—plus install all the monitoring and logging behind it—

and deliver it to the customers in very little time.”

After deploying New Relic, one of the first applications Kelly

and team turned their attention to was the company’s

implementation of the Adobe Experience Manager content

management system—which had been challenging to trouble-

shoot on premise. Says Kelly, “We chose to run Adobe Experience

Manager in the cloud versus on premise. As we migrated it to a

cloud environment, we worked with Adobe and New Relic to

come up with the proper ways to deploy APM and the Adobe

Our video team loves the data on video playback that they’re able to get out of New Relic Insights. They’ve designed all kinds of dashboards to collect key information on video performance.

Mark KellyDirector of Cloud and Infrastructure Services Architecture, Scripps Networks

Scripps Networks Interactive Keeps the Digital Content Flowing

content management system with monitoring points that would

allow us to troubleshoot code deployment issues much faster.”

The results were so powerful that Scripps Networks began

using New Relic to monitor every part of its stack. Says Kelly,

“Since most of our environments are deployed with New Relic

instrumentation built in—and we try to make these environments

as identical as possible—our troubleshooting efforts have become

much more streamlined and effective.”

Enabling a multi-channel environmentIn the years since New Relic’s original deployment, its use has

spread throughout Scripps Networks. One area that’s benefited

hugely from New Relic is video monitoring.

“Our video team loves the data on video playback that they’re

able to get out of New Relic Insights,” says Kelly. “They’ve

designed all kinds of dashboards to collect key information

on video performance.”

Perhaps the folks making the most use of New Relic at Scripps Networks are the

members of its Mobile and Emerging Platforms teams. Says Kelly, “These are our

leading-edge technology teams. They not only like to push the envelope, it’s

their job to do so.” As a result, they’re leveraging not just APM and Insights but

also New Relic Synthetics and New Relic Infrastructure to make sure that all of

Scripps’ customer interactions with content are successful ones.

These teams couldn’t be more pleased with the results. Says Marcus Irven, lead

architect for mobile and emerging platforms, “To stay competitive, we’re trying

to build experiences that are consistent and entertaining across every platform—

not just web and mobile. To ensure our application logic is as portable and reusable

across platforms, we develop and deploy using a microservices-based approach.

We use New Relic Insights to gain visibility into the interactions among all our

services. This has greatly facilitated our multi-platform development efforts.”

Another thing that’s made a big difference for Scripps is New Relic Alerts. With all

the company’s portable applications instrumented with APM, teams are able to

get alerts for just about any condition they’ve identified.

Case in point: The company can now even set alerts based on interactions with

third-party vendors—useful for things like seeing whether service level agreements

Scripps Networks Interactive Keeps the Digital Content Flowing

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are being met and allowing the Scripps teams to issue support tickets, when necessary,

in those vendors’ systems.

Supporting a serverless futureNext up for Irven and team is the development of a large serverless application to run

on AWS Lambda, a task greatly eased with the help of New Relic Infrastructure.

“Thanks to New Relic Infrastructure’s elegant integrations with AWS, we’ve been

able to set up alerting based on New Relic data and build dashboards through

New Relic Insights to get a clear view into Lambda performance,” Irven says.

“AWS cloud services monitoring data combined with application monitoring data

is immensely powerful—we get a full picture of our application delivery stack

performance all in one place with New Relic.”

The Mobile and Emerging Platform teams have also been using the New Relic API

to create automated alerts. For a company that needs to adjust its content and

services around recurring seasonal events such as pre-Thanksgiving traffic spikes

on its food-related websites, this ability to set automated alerts enables it to scale

in a consistent way across multiple applications and environments.

With a growing footprint in Microsoft Azure and video playback

provided through Google Cloud Platform, Scripps Networks

is already well on its way to gaining the benefits associated

with leveraging a multi-cloud environment. In the near future,

it plans to go all in with workloads running in all three clouds—

AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure. This will allow the

organization to take advantage of the use case strengths unique

to each cloud services provider and optimize utilization costs.

New Relic is uniquely positioned to support this strategic initiative.

“I want to be able to run code for any application using the

cloud platform that makes the most sense for the use case

while keeping costs optimized—be it Microsoft Azure, AWS,

or Google Cloud Platform,” says Kelly. “New Relic’s growing

support for leading cloud services providers gives me that

single pane of glass from which to monitor my applications

no matter where they are running.”

Thanks to New Relic Infrastructure’s elegant integrations with AWS, we’ve been able to set up alerting based on New Relic data and build dashboards through New Relic Insights to get a clear view into Lambda performance.

Marcus IrvenLead Architect for Mobile and Emerging Platforms, Scripps Networks

Scripps Networks Interactive Keeps the Digital Content Flowing