Global Processing uses New Relic AI for fast engineer onboarding

In Latin America, millions of people rely on home banking and digital payments. Global Processing makes sure these systems function smoothly, processing transactions for leading businesses in e-commerce like Ualá, in addition to banks, and electronic wallet providers.

Daily operations for any financial services provider are intense, as technology issues directly impact clients’ ability to transact and access funds. Because of this, Global Processing is held to strict standards—and penalized by credit card companies for every second of downtime. Global Processing’s work is further complicated by the fact that it has to work with a wide range of different APIs for different clients, increasing the surface area in the event of an incident.

After trying several different application performance monitoring (APM) solutions, Global Processing switched to New Relic in 2023 and saw immediate results.

Simplifying incidents and reducing noise

Maintaining strict performance metrics with a highly complex set of APIs was challenging for the observability team at Global Processing. Engineers were constantly checking different dashboards and trying to tie the disparate information together. Although these dashboards permitted basic status checks, they failed to deliver actionable insights. The Service Operations Center (SOC) had no choice but to contact on-call teams almost immediately every time they detected an anomaly—elevating the workloads and stress levels for on-call team members 

An alert was created for every anomaly, resulting in hundreds of emails stacking up in inboxes. An excessive volume of alerts—often false alarms—limited the team’s ability to deal with genuine issues efficiently and resulted in alert fatigue as waves of notifications made it impossible to identify the problems that mattered.

This noise in the system underscored the need for a more discerning approach to anomaly detection and alert management. By providing detailed insights and clearing the way for alerts that matter, New Relic application performance management (APM) helps Global Processing resolve issues quickly and avoid costly downtime. 

“A CPU can spike simply because a backup is taking place, but if that spike is impacting my user experience, it’s something I need to know about. We needed New Relic to separate the real issues from the noise," says Santiago Lator, Observability Team Lead at Global Processing.

When it came to New Relic, the real selling point for Global Processing was the alerting system. The ability to set thresholds and correlate incoming incidents led to an immediate decline in the number of alerts. In just two months, the company’s volume of incidents in its ticket platform fell by 50%—now that alerts are only created for important anomalies. Global Processing also began using New Relic to automatically log incidents in its ticketing platform. 

With half as many alerts, on-call teams have felt a significant reduction in pressure and reported a positive impact on their mental health. Teams concentrate on resolving the incident, thanks to quick answers from New Relic, rather than wasting time on administrative tasks—like manually entering the data and classification of incidents in the tracking system. This not only helps save time but improves the capacity of teams to respond to real risks effectively. The time the SOC team spent previously manually creating tickets is now used on proactive strategies, such as continuous improvement of security policies, identifying possible vulnerabilities, and implementing preventative measures for future risks. By focusing on relevant anomalies, teams look at critical alerts, rather than getting inundated with minor issues.

AI-empowered onboarding and comprehensive APM

Global Processing has also been an early adopter of New Relic AI.  The Global Processing observability team is focused on democratizing access to information, and New Relic AI is helping them achieve this. Team members with little to no background in observability can easily find their way around the platform. Using New Relic AI, stakeholders can get instant answers to questions like “How’s my service?” or “What SLAs am I breaking?”

For engineers with experience using APM, switching to a new platform with unique dashboards, signals, and metrics can be overwhelming too. New Relic AI makes onboarding easier by providing instant answers and insights around questions, such as an app's performance or navigating the platform. And because New Relic AI shares the query it translated from natural language into New Relic Query Language (NRQL) in its final response, Global Processing engineers have also mastered NRQL 10% faster using the AI capability— further accelerating their ability to maximize return on their observability investment.

30% reduction in MTTR, boosting uptime and improving user experience

With New Relic, Global Processing is transitioning from a fragmented tool set to a centralized system. New Relic’s system-wide monitoring and actionable alerts have led to a 30% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR), minimizing downtime and boosting operational efficiency. The team at Global Processing now has the tools to keep executing on their ultimate goal: delivering an exceptional customer experience. Empowered by New Relic AI, every team member can access the information they need in seconds, and the observability team can focus on completing their core tasks instead of managing an endless queue of tickets.