BASF Agricultural Solutions’ digital portfolio is structured across multiple products. Each product is supported by multiple applications. The challenge of such a complex portfolio is observing what’s happening inside of it. Teams were spread across multiple monitoring tools and use cases which forced teams to manually compile all monthly and quarterly reports. This delayed technical issue fixes and business decision making.
Leadership started to demand a holistic view of the business’ technical health. BASF Agricultural Solutions needed a single source of truth for their data—a unified dashboard that could seamlessly connect the health of their technical landscape (infrastructure, application performance) with critical business metrics (user adoption, costs and security) and give teams their time back.
Maintaining such a large and complex portfolio would require an extensive and resource-consuming implementation. With New Relic, the entire stack is covered in an all-in-one solution. BASF Agricultural Solutions chose New Relic for its ability to collect, harmonize, and present data across different sources, including third-party systems.
BASF Agricultural Solutions operates a large and complex portfolio structured by applications, digital products and product families. A digital product could be an application, a bundle of applications, or a set of technical components serving a business process. These digital products are assigned to a product family (AKA digital business platform). Each digital product has its own infrastructure.
Bringing together a complex environment for informed decision making
Led by Patrick Diebold, Head of Hub Delivery Madrid, IT, Data & Digital Transformation at BASF Agricultural Solutions, the Monitoring team developed the Global Application Monitoring Experience (GAME) Board. The team mapped every digital product and application to New Relic, bridging technical components (logs, traces) with business entities (teams, product families).
The GAME Board is a RAG and health status dashboard. The colours represent the status of a product, based on the health status of the applications that support it. Tiles are sorted by status with timestamps of the last change, with filtering capabilities to support the portfolio structure.
The GAME Board is a dashboard with a real-time view of all telemetry data, multiple cloud environments, and application data. This dashboard replicates the BASF Agricultural Solutions portfolio structure using backend logic, built on New Relic. All entities are mapped to a workload—workloads logically group entities together to view health and activity by team or project—created per application, without connecting infrastructure to New Relic. GraphQL then brings in this data using New Relic APIs. All queries are then already connected to the productive environment via the workload, including specific information for escalations, such as creating tickets on Jira or ServiceNow.
The GAME Board replicates the BASF portfolio structure using backend logic, featuring sorting capabilities that prioritize applications by health status to ensure immediate visibility of critical issues.
“When you enter our offices in Germany, there’s a big screen. As the Head of IT enters the office, he sees traffic light colours and instantly knows if there is a problem,” says Patrick.
The GAME Board is a RAG and health status dashboard, providing immediate, executive-level visibility into the health status of the entire application portfolio. This real-time view has replaced manual reporting, allowing leadership to instantly see and assess any issues.
A detailed view of the "Fruit Portal" dashboard includes sections for entities, application owner, workload details, locations, team contact, and alert violations.
Democratizing data and shifting left
“New Relic is super powerful. It can give us a lot, but the big piece is bringing it into the organization and making the output accessible to the relevant stakeholders,” says Patrick.
This strategic GAME Board initiative democratized data and enforced a culture of decentralized ownership with centralized governance at BASF Agricultural Solutions. Instead of relying on the central IT team, technical teams are now responsible for their own monitoring and escalations.
Teams can operate many applications across any region. The GAME Board gives each team its own complete, user-friendly overview of their applications and service health. For example, teams can filter to see all components using infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. With a true representation of all applications and their environments, BASF Agricultural Solutions can develop and expand their monitoring implementation across the entire digital portfolio.
“New Relic helps us to understand what is normal, so we can go from a reactive to proactive approach. We see things coming before they’re running red,” says Patrick.
In addition to internal service health, the dashboard shows dependencies and error origins, including errors from third-party services. When there is an issue, teams get notified via email. From here, they can drill into problems from the very beginning, where they can see details, like logs or a breakdown of what happened, in New Relic.
“By mapping our entire portfolio to infrastructure components, we can easily change thresholds, KPIs, or focus on a specific technical component,” says Ricardo Aveledo, Delivery Lead, AP Monitoring at IT, Data & Digital Transformation at BASF Agricultural Solutions.
New Relic helps us to understand what is normal, so we can go from a reactive to proactive approach. We see things coming before they’re running red.
Pre-production risk reduction
To lower the incidence of production errors, BASF Agricultural Solutions uses synthetics monitoring to simulate user traffic before deploying new software or updates to catch performance issues before they go into production and impact users.
Rapid, automated onboarding
New users logging into New Relic for the first time can see their entire application status and health in seconds.
User onboarding is simplified using Terraform scripts. Terraform automates application and environment instrumentation so that teams only need to connect their infrastructure. They can do this by installing an agent or with the OpenTelemetry (OTel) integration.
New Relic’s deep integrations with cloud environments including AWS and Azure simplify the onboarding process further. Roles and permissions are automatically replicated from cloud providers through an API call. This automated infrastructure instrumentation connects accounts within 10 minutes. No manual tasks needed.
By mapping our entire portfolio to infrastructure components, we can easily change thresholds, KPIs, or focus on a specific technical component.
Connecting technical health to business metrics
The true value of the GAME Board lies in its ability to facilitate informed business decision-making.
BASF Agricultural Solutions uses New Relic to track business KPIs, such as the number of users at a given time. By correlating this data with the underlying technical performance, stakeholders can make intelligent decisions on the digital roadmap—prioritizing improvements or adding new capabilities where they will have the greatest impact on the customer experience.
The implementation of the GAME Board has transformed how BASF Agricultural Solutions operates. A one-time effort to build the centralized view has created a repeatable process, allowing technical teams to spend less time troubleshooting and more time improving the user experience and shipping new features and functionality.
