Online gaming and betting are a fast-growing, dynamic industry. New Relic is helping top gaming solutions company EveryMatrix drive innovative new services for its clients and deliver outstanding player experiences.
EveryMatrix provides a complete technology platform for gaming operators including casinos, sports betting, and payments. To respond to different customers’ demands, the company is divided up into smaller business units, which have their own technology leaders as well as independent teams that adapt and integrate EveryMatrix’s modular product suite for different clients.
While this approach enables EveryMatrix to tailor their technology to client needs, it creates some tough operational and IT governance challenges, says group CTO Rafael Campuzano: ‘Ensuring alignment on how we manage all processes and operations to the same, highest quality—especially on incident management—is challenging because we’ve changed our focus from supporting many smaller clients to working with fewer, larger clients who are growing faster with many more operations and players. Bigger clients expect and demand a much more stable, reliable modern platform that is 100% available to players.’
A single source of truth to unify the business
It was clear to Campuzano that there had to be a standardised platform for understanding and managing the performance across a complex array of different applications and infrastructure.
‘To serve our clients and their customers, EveryMatrix needs a single source of truth to always know what’s going on. New Relic comes straight out of the box and with almost no tuning immediately unveils a great amount of information about how our platform is behaving. This is vital to us,’ says Campuzano.
Incident management depends on New Relic as Mihnea Dobre, head of IT governance, explains: ‘My team oversees monitoring and stopping anything that happens that’s out of the ordinary. We use New Relic every day, and of the 25 tabs we have open all the time, 20 are New Relic. Without New Relic, we wouldn't understand even half of our incidents. We can see into the data, go into transactions and see even the actual server that had the problem or the database instance. The level of detail from New Relic helps us identify the problem, and then come up with action points to prevent the same problem happening again.’
Troubleshooting to keep the dice rolling
For such a complicated business with teams spread around the world in China, Romania, and Ukraine, coordinating a rapid response to an incident is enabled by how all the teams in each business unit use New Relic.
‘Whenever we see something happening, my central team already knows which team to call and give them exactly the moment in New Relic to investigate’, says Campuzano. ‘Each application team can be mobilised in less than three minutes for preventing any major incidents successfully”’
When performance issues affect the players’ ability to game, the damage to EveryMatrix can be severe in terms of its reputation and potential financial penalties for missed KPIs. The ability to troubleshoot and resolve a problem quickly and before it affects player experience is essential thanks to the depth of insights and observability possible with New Relic.
‘Yes, New Relic lets us respond fast, but it is more than that; it enables us to act more directly and effectively. Our platform is very challenging with so many moving, inter-related parts. Sometimes, you don't know when something happens nor where to look. Finding answers would have meant diving into thousands of lines of logs, which is an almost impossible task. New Relic correlates all of the data for us and shows us clearly what the root cause is and where it is’, says Campuzano.