Darwinbox is an enterprise HCM Platform that engages employees, automates and simplifies HR processes.
A leading human resources (HR) technology platform, Darwinbox powers end-to-end employee lifecycle management for companies of various sizes across multiple industries. With AI at the heart of its platform, Darwinbox empowers businesses to drive efficiency in HR operations, transform talent management, and enhance the experiences of its employees.
As a SaaS platform, Darwinbox sought to achieve consistency in application monitoring, while improving user experiences, and driving down cloud costs. The company turned to New Relic while they were in startup mode, to reduce disruptions and meet service level agreements.
From downtime to proactive issue resolution
When Darwinbox was an early stage startup, the company leveraged open source tools to monitor and troubleshoot application performance. The company relied on disparate tools for logs, metrics, and alerts, which caused inefficiencies and longer resolution times. DevSecOps and SRE teams were challenged to detect bottlenecks in real-time, and correlating data across systems proved time consuming.
“In the initial stages, we weren’t able to retain more metrics. Alerts weren’t coming in regularly, and our teams were challenged to monitor the entire architecture,” said Vinod Basavani, Senior Engineering Manager at Darwinbox.
Before adopting New Relic, Darwinbox needed to schedule planned downtime that lasted between four and 24 hours. While customers were informed well in advance, such downtime wasn’t conducive to delivering the exceptional customer experience Darwinbox prides itself on. For this reason, Vinod - who has been with Darwinbox for seven years - chose to adopt New Relic Application Performance Monitoring (APM).
“New Relic offered a comprehensive solution for APM, logs, infrastructure, and browser monitoring. This has been instrumental in enabling us to scale while maintaining high availability and performance. It has enabled faster incident response, proactive performance tuning, and seamless handling of peak loads, which are all critical to customer satisfaction and retention,” he said.
Using the New Relic platform has enabled Darwinbox to go from hours of planned downtime to 99.99% uptime. The company has decreased outages by 20% and reduced mean time to resolve (MTTR) by 40%.
New Relic browser monitoring has improved Core Web Vitals, which has led to better SEO rankings for the business. Faster troubleshooting has also cut developer time spent on debugging by 30%.
“New Relic is helping us identify issues before our applications reach production. Every line of code is checked in the load testing environment, and we proactively identify any issues well ahead of time."
Minimizing errors, improving customer experience
With its customers seeking easy to use products and applications that load quickly, the Darwinbox engineering team grappled with issues regarding latency and errors, which created a less than desirable experience for its customer base.
After adopting New Relic, Darwinbox saw its page load time drop to less than one second, while its error rate dropped by 35%.
“Our service level agreements promise our customers one-second page load time and an error rate of 0.05%. Thanks to New Relic, we have met these targets while simultaneously improving the user experience,” Vinod added.
By using distributed tracing, Darwinbox has uncovered hidden latencies in inter-service communication. New Relic logs in context has quickly identified and resolved obscure errors that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, and potentially led to bigger problems in the future.
The company also leverages New Relic browser monitoring and real-user monitoring (RUM) to understand user journeys. By analyzing page load times and transaction speeds, Darwinbox has reduced its average response times by 25%, significantly improving the user experience.
Optimizing cloud costs
As a SaaS platform, the cloud is invaluable to Darwinbox’s business. However, without the right monitoring tools, the company was prone to over-provisioning. Using New Relic APM, the company was able to gather real-time insights into resource utilization, transaction times, and bottlenecks during high-traffic periods. It has allowed engineering teams to auto-scale effectively and ensure smooth operations, even during peak usage.
With developer teams working individually, requests for provisioning additional cloud resources were constant. Engineering teams gathered detailed insights into cloud resource utilization, identified underutilized resources and scaled down, while also pinpointing unusual spikes in cloud costs. This combined approach has enabled Darwinbox to effectively optimize cloud costs.
“Through alert noise reduction, precise anomaly detection, and contextual logs, New Relic helps us focus on critical issues. The impact has been a reduction in cloud costs, improvement to incident management workflows, and an increase in overall resilience,” Vinod added.
