Leading travel technology company Serko delivers corporate booking experiences for some of the world's largest organisations. As they rapidly expanded through organic growth and strategic acquisitions - including a strong partnership with Booking.com - the complexity of its digital infrastructure grew in lock step with its ambitions.
To manage a diverse estate of platforms and services, Serko looked to New Relic, partner since 2020, for application performance monitoring (APM). What began as a focused tooling decision evolved into a strategic observability partnership that now underpins Serko's entire engineering culture, providing a unified view across every system, team, and cloud environment.
Today, New Relic is used by over 150 users in 17 departments. Most notably, Serko now measures downtime in minutes rather than hours, an improvement so dramatic that charts had to be rescaled to show current downtime numbers.
The challenge: Flying blind at scale
Corporate travel is high-stakes and time-sensitive. When a travel manager needs to book a flight for an executive at short notice, booking platforms are expected to work every single time. The margin for failure is essentially zero.
As Serko scaled, it faced visibility challenges. Systems sprawled across multiple clouds and inherited technology stacks from acquisitions. Different teams used different monitoring tools, creating fragmented, inconsistent coverage. The consequences included:
- Customers reporting issues before internal teams knew they existed, which eroded trust with major enterprise accounts.
- Incidents were measured in hours, not minutes, with resolution consuming enormous volumes of engineering time.
- Leadership had no reliable, consolidated view of system health across the entire product portfolio.
- Reactive firefighting consumed engineering capacity that should have been spent on product innovation.
Simon Young, CTO, Serko said, "We had only a superficial view of how things connected to each other. Customers would sometimes report an error before anyone on staff knew what was going on. We needed the ability to detect, correlate, and resolve issues across every layer of our technology estate, in real time.”
Observability as a strategic foundation
After evaluating New Relic and then joining as a customer in 2020, Serko has expanded its adoption over the past six years and today has a comprehensive, company-wide observability platform with consolidated monitoring across its entire digital estate of products, services, and infrastructure.
- A single pane of glass - The biggest shift was establishing a unified interface for all engineering teams. Whether debugging a failed API call, investigating a slow page load, or tracing a booking workflow end-to-end, engineers now navigate a single platform. Cross-referencing events from front-end interactions to backend microservices across systems is now a standard, efficient practice.
- Observability embedded into every deployment - Serko integrated New Relic directly into its infrastructure orchestration tooling. Using an internal service catalogue, Serko’s templates now include New Relic configuration by default. Any new service spun up in development, test, or production automatically inherits full observability from day one. This has eliminated any risk of "dark" services operating without visibility.
- Consistent coverage across acquisitions - Serko standardised on New Relic across all inherited, disparate technology stacks, which provided leadership a single, coherent view of operational health.
- Faster, smarter incident response - New Relic data now flows directly into Serko's incident management workflows. When issues arise, teams pull correlated data into their incident rooms and isolate root cause in minutes rather than hours.
"Our aim was to land on a single observability platform that we could standardise across our entire estate. New Relic gave us the solution that could grow with us as we scaled, consolidated acquisitions, and moved into new markets. The consistent interface across all of our teams aligns with one of our core guiding principles - dare to simplify," said Simon Young.
From reactive to resilient
The results speak for themselves. Serko now measures downtime in minutes rather than hours. The volume of incidents has fallen dramatically, and when issues do occur, teams resolve them with a fraction of the engineering effort previously required.
"We measure downtime in minutes now, not hours. We've had to change the axis on our reporting charts because the improvement is so dramatic you can't see the current data on the year-on-year scale," shared Simon Young.
"We measure downtime in minutes now, not hours. We've had to change the axis on our reporting charts because the improvement is so dramatic you can't see the current data on the year-on-year scale."
Key metrics include:
- 60% reduction in high impact incidents
- 30% improvement in automated issue detection
- 20% increase in customer satisfaction
- 2 hours saved per engineer, per week
- 6 year partnership
- 155 users across 17 departments
A custom metric for Serko is engineering hours spent on incidents per thousand bookings. What once consumed hours of engineering time now takes fractions of a minute. Those reclaimed hours are being reinvested into building better products. The shift is visible at every level of the organisation, including incident performance reporting to Serko’s board.
Customer experience has been transformed, with customer satisfaction increasing by 20%. The existential incidents of previous years, such as complete platform outages that left clients stranded, are gone.
Internally, the efficiency gains are equally significant. Engineers save at least two hours per week previously lost to reactive troubleshooting. That capacity is now able to be directed toward innovation, including Serko.ai, the new multi-agent AI solution designed to act on behalf of both travellers and companies. Dashboards are being surfaced more broadly across the organisation, making operational health a visible, shared concern for both engineering and product teams.
The future: Scaling with confidence
Serko is entering its most ambitious growth phase yet, with major initiatives like Serko.ai and an expanded Booking.com partnership underway. Both are being built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as Serko transitions its primary cloud infrastructure from Azure to GCP over the coming months. New Relic is central to that migration, ensuring that as systems move and new services come online, observability coverage is immediate and complete.
The priority remains to support Serko's strategic direction in consolidating technology, simplifying complexity and building to the scale and stability that a global corporate travel platform demands. With New Relic as a core pillar of that strategy, Serko has the visibility to stay ahead of issues and the confidence to grow without compromising the experience customers depend on.
Simon Young concluded, "The partnership with New Relic is a very important part of our strategy. New Relic gives us that single pane of glass across all of our systems, so we know what’s going on behind the scenes at every point of the user journey and what needs fixing or improving before the customer does."
