Virtuo's promise is a rental car in a few simple clicks on your cell phone whenever you need one, without going through an agency. The French scale-up is revolutionizing the auto rental business through an entirely digital customer journey. In a short time, Virtuo has seen significant growth. In just three years, the company's workforce has quadrupled and now counts 45 technical and product experts. This expansion has pushed the startup to consolidate its technology and improve its observability practices and monitoring tools.
Like many other organizations, Virtuo previously relied on dozens of tools spread across different teams to monitor the various parts of its stack. But instead of improving the mean time to resolution (MTTR) and the mean time to detection (MTTD), this disjointed approach had many downsides. Virtuo's teams relied on logz.io to analyze logs and on the Heroku platform‑as‑a‑service to manage its infrastructure and obtain basic information on its apps. As it grew, the company later turned to Google Cloud Platform, before installing New Relic for monitoring apps, the ELK suite by Elasticsearch for logs, and Prometheus for metrics.
This open source suite was convincing at first, but the operational maintenance required internally as well as the recurring loss of logs motivated the tech team to seek out new solutions. At that time, however, the cost of a single platform, like New Relic, to consolidate metrics, events, logs, and tracing prevented the startup from gaining speed.
In July 2020, New Relic adopted a consumption-based pricing model that aligned with Virtuo's plans for growth. "Instead of pricing each capability as a separate SKU, like other vendors on the market, with New Relic, an organization only pays for what it uses with no overage penalties," says Olivier Martin, CTO at Virtuo. After initial discussions and a testing phase, the New Relic solution won for the ease of deployment and the quality and quantity of data.
Before New Relic, we used many tools. We had to rely on many different skills. The developers managed the logs and the DevOps managed the dashboards, which resulted in very few interactions between them. Thanks to New Relic, all this data is now handled within a single tool, facilitating excellent team communication.
Virtuo relied on New Relic to optimize log management, reduce troubleshooting time, and improve MTTR. Before New Relic, issues were reported by operational teams. But New Relic enables data collection, searches, and log correlation from apps, infrastructure and network devices with logs in context. Millions of logs can be analyzed in a single click. With New Relic, anomaly detection and error elimination have become simpler, allowing the tech teams to be more proactive and respond to issues in record time.
"Today, our teams detect and resolve anomalies in less than an hour. It took us hours in the past. Alerts and tool sharing measure the extent of an issue and resolve it. Our response time is now much faster, which improves customer experience."
A mature tool to attract and retain talent
Recruiting technical employees has become more difficult for companies of all sizes. Developers, operations, and data analysts, who were already hard to find, have become a rare commodity. To attract them, companies must double down on their recruiting efforts and offer tools suitable for the market.
"Job candidates have their own requirements in terms of tools," says Olivier Martin, CTO of Virtuo. "The fact that we are using New Relic has already been the one small advantage that gets a talent to join our team. We have seen that developers appreciate some tools and reject others. Today, New Relic's solution is a compelling argument to attract talent. The applicants feel they are dealing with a mature company in this domain that understands the importance and the challenges of observability."
In addition to helping seduce the most sought-after developers, Virtuo's mature observability strategy and the monitoring provided by New Relic allow the startup to retain experts and play an important role in the morale of engineers. Virtuo's various departments, which previously were operating in silos, are now working together thanks to New Relic's solutions.
While Virtuo's IT teams have fully adopted and are using the New Relic platform, the company still has many settings to uncover and keep track of all the new features from the observability expert to implement them as it grows.
