A renowned media brand with a rich publishing history, News UK is home to some of the biggest and most popular British newspapers, including The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun, which remains the UKโs number one newspaper with more than 3.9 million daily readers, and nearly 70 million monthly unique visitors. The Times and The Sunday Times serve a premium audience with a subscription-based model for their website, smartphone apps, and tablet editions.
Growing a digital publishing powerhouse
In an effort to support the companyโs growing readership, News UKโs in-house development and operations teams recently made the decision to move toward a DevOps (agile IT) framework. Once adopted, this will introduce agile service management to the organisationโs already agile software development, helping better align the two functions so that they can measure performance, solve problems in a rapid fashion, and ultimately track the companyโs growth.
News UK originally used seven different analytics and monitoring solutions, which resulted in seven slightly varying โtruthsโ when reporting on performance analytics. The use of multiple monitoring systems also meant that another solution had to be utilised to manage the alerts from these systems during operations incidents.
The company also needed to dig deeper into the causes of digital and operations issuesโsomething that was proving to be very time-consuming and resource intensive.
News UK meets New Relic
It was quickly evident that New Relic would support News UKโs incident management process and help support its transition to a DevOps culture. The company was able to introduce New Relic APM 360 and New Relic Insights to its development and operations teams thanks to a straightforward installation procedure, and get sample dashboards displaying real-time metrics up and running in a matter of minutesโsomething that had not been possible with other monitoring and optimisation solutions. Several months later, New Relic was adopted companywide and started reporting useful and actionable performance metrics across 50 applications, 15 consumer-facing websites, and 15 mobile apps.
New Relic's numerous integrations were another reason for its quick adoption. After setting up alert policies for all applications, these were configured with Slack in order to post critical alerts to specific channels monitored by the News UK operations team. To add extra efficiency, the company plugged the alert policies into its incident management system (RemedyForce, built on the Salesforce platform) so that all New Relic alerts automatically opened incident tickets, assigned them to the appropriate teams, and closed the tickets when those incidents were resolved.
