New Relic

Case Study: Sonatype

How does the world's largest Java Open Source component repository deliver superior service?

Sonatype was founded in 2008 by Jason van Zyl, the creator of Apache Maven, to deliver innovative solutions that increase developer productivity, improve project management, and reduce business risk. Sonatype manages and maintains the Central repository, which, in the open source world, has become the primary exchange for open-source Java components or artifacts. The Central Repository houses more than 300,000 open source software (OSS) components and receives more than 4 Billion requests per year, making it one of the most widely accessed services on the web. It is used by 42,000 development organizations every month.

An integral part of maximizing the usability of the Central Repository is providing both publishing and search mechanisms. Thousands of open source projects use Sonatype’s infrastructure (Sonatype OSS Repository Hosting, or OSSRH) for publishing their software to Central, where Java developers from around the world can then download it. Sonatype also provides a search mechanism for searching Central at search.maven.org The Central Repository, the Sonatype OSSRH, and search.maven.org together form a Java open source ecosystem for open source projects and Java developers around the globe.

"The deep integration that New Relic provides for Java based applications, in addition to the deep analytics of MySQL, Apache Lucene and Apache Solr, were the critical deciding factors. This support lets us really see what’s going on inside our applications and critical third party components, and was unique across all the tools we reviewed"

Brian Fox,
Sonatype VP of Product Management

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Challenges

Maintain high performance and easy access across Java open source ecosystem that supports:
300,000 OSS components in the Central Repository - and growing
4 Billion access requests to the Repository each year

Solution

New Relic provides deep integration into Java, Lucene, Solr, and MySQL
New Relic monitors all aspects of the Java OSS component ecosystem – the Central Repository, Sonatype OSS RH, and search.maven.org
New Relic delivers insight into what’s going on inside our applications and critical third party components

Results

Achieved almost immediate performance improvements
Achieved productivity boost by preventing problems and outages
Speeds diagnosing problems for rapid resolution
Monitor memory profiles to determine when and where to add memory to avoid excessive swapping

Environment

This ecosystem runs on a combination of Java, MySQL, Apache Lucene, and Apache Solr. Hosting services are provided by Contegix and DNS global load balancing is provided by Dyn Inc.