Our goal is always to be as proactive with our customers as possible, rather than having to react when they call us with issues. We want to be able to see directly if they’re experiencing slow performance and immediately determine what the issue is so we can resolve it before they have to call. New Relic does a great job of enabling us to do that.
Challenge
Viewpoint, a Trimble company, has been a construction software industry leader for more than 40 years, focused on connecting critical business functions like accounting and project management with field operations. The company has relied on New Relic technologies since 2013, primarily for application performance monitoring, while using a third-party tool to monitor infrastructure.
Over time, the company’s existing monitoring tool became much too costly and created data silos. It also inundated Viewpoint’s engineers with alert noise—as many as 3,500 alerts per week, the majority of which were false positives, making it impossible for the team to respond efficiently or effectively to genuine issues.
As part of its long-term cloud journey, Viewpoint initiated a project to migrate its single-tenant ERP application, Vista, and construction management application, Spectrum, to Kubernetes clusters in the cloud. This involved moving more than 4,500 hosts supporting the applications without disrupting service or support for customers. Further, these legacy applications were not designed for cloud and had been highly customized over many years. Identifying the underlying causes of known performance issues had already proved difficult due to data silos and limited visibility with the previous monitoring tool, which posed a major risk of negatively impacting customers’ digital experience with their products. Therefore, the company decided it needed a better way to instrument these single-tenant applications in the cloud to improve observability.
Solution
Viewpoint adopted New Relic for unified observability across applications and infrastructure in its Kubernetes clusters. This approach enables a wide range of users—including DevOps, customer support, performance engineers, QA, and test—to correlate data from across the cloud environment to gain a clear, real-time picture of application health and operational performance to help ensure uptime and a positive digital experience for customers.
New Relic provides an all-in-one platform for engineers to monitor the full extent of application and infrastructure conditions, track and respond to alerts, as well as proactively identify potential issues before they impact performance or uptime. In addition to creating dashboards for its internal users, Viewpoint also tailored shared dashboards for its customers to provide complete transparency into issues being investigated and remediated.
Additionally, New Relic dramatically reduced alert noise, enabling engineers to focus on issues that matter with confidence, and has helped reduce costs substantially compared to the previous monitoring solution.
Outcomes
- Lowered Costs: Viewpoint saved 57 percent by moving from previous monitoring tool to New Relic.
- Improved Engineering Efficiency: Reduced alert noise from >3,500 to <600 per week, enabling engineers to focus on true issues affecting applications.
- Accelerated Mean Time to Detection: Correlation of application and infrastructure data simplifies the process of detecting and responding to issues.
- Reduced Mean Time to Remediation: Faster, more accurate and detailed alerting enables engineers to remediate issues more quickly.
- Improved Transparency: Allows customers to gain direct visibility into the systems Viewpoint is managing on their behalf.
- Elevated Uptime: By identifying and resolving issues proactively, Viewpoint assures higher application uptime and delivers a higher-quality digital experience for its customers.
- Increased Performance: Some core application services saw a 10x performance gain; identity management response times improved from >100 ms to ~65 ms.
With end-to-end observability under the hood in New Relic, it’s been simple to instrument our applications as we move them to the cloud. Being able to grab that telemetry data and take action before issues arise or customers notice—that’s been huge.
