France Télévisions S.A. is the French public national television broadcaster, which operates the channels France 2, France 3, France 4, France 5, France Ô, and Franceinfo. Every day, more than half of French citizens watch the channels that makeup France Télévisions. The public company is also the top media brand in France across PC, mobile, and tablet devices, with 18 million unique visitors each month, and Internet-based video consumption of more than 4.1 billion in 2016.
Guillaume Postaire is deputy chief technology officer responsible for infrastructure and architecture at the Numérique’ (digital) department of France Télévisions. The Numérique department is responsible for everything digital at France Télévisions, including their websites and mobile applications. With an ever-increasing percentage of France Télévisions’ audience using one of its digital media products, the infrastructure and architecture team knows that they play a critical role in helping the company succeed in its digital transformation. That’s why the team needed as much data and insight as possible into software performance and customer experience.
"We needed a way to truly understand performance and gain end-to-end visibility into our infrastructure," says Postaire. "I knew from past experience that we should be using an application performance management tool."
Demonstrating software performance and quality
Postaire convinced his team to try New Relic for monitoring performance and troubleshooting issues. "We tested New Relic against another tool," says Nassim Ait Boufrad, team leader in the infrastructure group at France Télévisions Numérique department. "And New Relic delivered the best results." Today, the infrastructure and architecture team uses New Relic application performance monitoring (APM), browser monitoring, mobile, and synthetics to analyze the performance of its software.
With New Relic in place, France Télévisions has real-time visibility and the in-depth data it needs to quickly pinpoint the cause of performance issues. Postaire provides an example of how New Relic helped his team respond quickly to an issue: "When we recently migrated our database infrastructure, it experienced a major performance degradation. With New Relic, it was easy to identify the source of the problem, which turned out to be a proxy issue. We were then able to fix the problem promptly."
Supporting teamwork with one source of truth
Numérique’s teams are also using New Relic to support a DevOps approach to continuous development, testing, and deployment. "Every day, each team has a short stand-up meeting dedicated to DevOps execution,” says Ait Boufrad. "We also try to demo the product at every sprint and we use New Relic to demonstrate the performance and quality of the software for the product owner and sponsor."
With New Relic, all Numérique team members have real-time data about software performance that everyone can agree on. With one source of data and end-to-end visibility, New Relic eliminates any finger-pointing and guesswork to help the team work together better to troubleshoot and fix problems. "Having deep visibility with New Relic helps infrastructure people and developers pinpoint the exact problem instead of ping-ponging the problem back and forth between devs and ops," says Ait Boufrad.
Beyond troubleshooting performance issues in production, New Relic supports the organization’s continuous deployment goals. "You can’t do continuous deployment without a good tool like New Relic to detect if something goes wrong," says Postaire. "New Relic is one of the most important tools we have because we can quickly identify bugs and resolve them."
As the digital group within France Télévisions continues to break new ground, New Relic will be there to help the infrastructure and architecture team deliver the software quality and performance that the company needs to remain an industry leader.
You can’t do continuous deployment without a good tool like New Relic to detect if something goes wrong. New Relic is one of the most important tools we have because we can quickly identify bugs and resolve them.
