Fueled by millions of creators around the globe, Shutterstock, Inc. is a leading global platform for licensing high-quality 3D models, videos, music, photographs, vectors, and illustrations.
Shutterstock relies on a complex web of systems and applications to maintain a comprehensive library of over 700 million content items, as well as an all-in-one content editing platform and studio production service. The company depends on data to keep its intricate tech stack running smoothly, identify security threats, and support engineers to make informed decisions.
With New Relic, our engineers have the information they need to resolve potential business-critical events faster, so we can focus on helping our customers tell their stories through our extensive content library.
Reducing spend while increasing monitoring capabilities
Engineers found that they often spent hours generating reports on fraud patterns detected in their logs, which cost precious time and resources. Given that malicious IPs attempt to access accounts for fraud, engineers needed better and faster visibility into potential threats to keep users safe.
The Shutterstock team decided to explore an observability solution to advance their monitoring capabilities, protect customer information, and continue delivering an exceptional user experience. Shutterstock partnered with New Relic, working directly with the New Relic engineering team to roll out an advanced observability strategy to correlate telemetry and business data in a single pane of glass.
“Having the necessary tooling to provide our engineers with faster access to data-driven insights has become a core component in improving performance reliability, minimizing fraud, and protecting customer data,” says Christian Bobadilla, director of product and application security at Shutterstock.
By moving to New Relic, Shutterstock can now make informed engineering decisions with logs in context—logs together with issues in applications and infrastructure—and logs query enhancements—support for complex query logic to help answer hard questions with high volumes of data. The previous tool took hours or days to generate reports on fraud patterns, New Relic can do this in minutes. Shutterstock can now get this security data into the hands of the experts immediately. This keeps rules updated and customers safe. The logs query enhancement also provides full business reporting, including tracking Core Web Vitals.
Detailed data on suspicious behavior
The Shutterstock team can assess suspicious activities and potential fraud patterns with subqueries and the filter function, surfacing multiple login attempts from single IP sources targeting customer accounts so they can proactively block bad actors and better secure customers against account takeovers.
Three critical requirements from the Shutterstock team were JOINs, GeoIP, and Lookups. New Relic GeoIP enriches log data with geolocation information so engineers can zero in on when and where threats are coming from. JOINs give teams the power to compare current activity against datasets from previous hack attempts or a list of known bad actors. Lookups allow them to combine data that's not in New Relic with the rest of their telemetry. The filter function helps aggregate data in a way that’s meaningful for the security team. With data export, as New Relic is extensible with APIs and the ability to automate, Shutterstock engineers can produce high quality reports about fraud trends—in minutes instead of days, decreasing the time this task takes by more than 75%.
“With New Relic, our engineers have the information they need to resolve potential business-critical events faster, so we can focus on helping our customers tell their stories through our extensive content library,” Christian says.
By implementing New Relic, Shutterstock has created a safer environment for all customers and simultaneously built a more engineer-friendly observability experience by consolidating tools and standardizing practices. As a result, the company has significantly improved developer productivity, saving time and money, while having visibility into metrics to improve KPIs.
