For Acko, a pioneering digital insurance company in India established in late 2017, observability was never an afterthought. As a direct-to-consumer (D2C) platform, Acko’s website and app serve as the primary interface for millions of customers, making their technology infrastructure the core of customer trust and product delivery. In an industry where customer interactions are 24/7, Acko understood from day one that a robust observability strategy, alongside functional correctness, performance, and security, was a critical requirement for their systems.
Since partnering with New Relic in 2018, Acko has ensured 24/7 system uptime and efficient scaling of its insurance products. The collaboration has resulted in a 20% reduction in costs, a 20% reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), and Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) reducing to under five minutes. New Relic's platform has also enabled Acko to improve system resilience, accelerate software releases, and build digital trust with customers.
Navigating a complex digital insurance landscape
Acko faces distinct business and technical challenges as a digital-first insurer. Building trust in an entirely online model, where the benefits of a purchased policy may only materialize years later, is inherently more complex than traditional, brick-and-mortar insurance. Acko must manage a vast spectrum of consumer behaviors and product complexities—from seamless, one-rupee ride insurance embedded in a ride-sharing app, to multi-week buying cycles for complex health and life insurance policies. This demands an incredibly flexible and unified information architecture that can cater to instantaneous transactions and prolonged research journeys simultaneously. Technologically, Acko operates as a hybrid entity: requiring the agility and responsiveness of an e-commerce platform, while also maintaining the long-term data integrity and management typical of a financial services company.
This duality means Acko’s observability requirements are distinct from traditional e-commerce or insurance players. Further complicating this is their multi-cloud environment and the development of their proprietary insurance operating system platform, sureOS, that Acko itself builds and consumes. These factors collectively create an inherently complex system where traditional, fragmented monitoring solutions simply cannot provide the holistic, real-time insights needed to ensure continuous availability and performance.
“Our systems are at the center of our product strategy. So, observability has been our engineering focus since day one of operation,” said Harish Rama Rao, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Acko.
Proactive observability for scalable innovation and customer trust
To address these challenges, Acko began their partnership with New Relic in 2018. New Relic’s ability to seamlessly integrate across Acko’s entire technology stack, from infrastructure and mobile to applications, functional components, and high-level consumer metrics, provided the comprehensive visibility required for their intricate, service-based architecture.
New Relic’s rich and user-friendly features were key differentiators. It was also the natural choice for Acko’s technical team, as many of its engineers were already familiar with New Relic, and its platform offered a wealth of out-of-the-box dashboards and standard reports. This made it straightforward for Acko’s teams to quickly set up and understand system behavior without extensive custom development. This ease of use extends beyond engineers. Product owners at Acko can leverage business-centric dashboards to correlate system health with key performance indicators like sales, fostering a more data-driven approach across departments.
Crucially, Acko leveraged New Relic to establish a "templated solution" for their APM best practices. This standardized approach, covering how to monitor databases, queues, streaming systems like Kafka, and individual applications, allowed Acko to rapidly scale their observability efforts. As they expanded into new product lines such as health and life insurance, and diversified into embedded and partnership models, this template was able to be efficiently tweaked and applied, ensuring consistent, high-quality monitoring across their growing portfolio.
“Let's say a customer was stuck on the payment page for a very long period of time, at Acko, we want to know that early on so we can proactively fix it. That’s where New Relic plays a major role. New Relic’s APM helped us figure out a best practice system, which was easily scalable in other areas of insurance,” Harish Rama Rao added.
Enhanced resilience, faster time-to-market
Acko has consistently leveraged New Relic’s observability platform to shift towards a deeply proactive operational posture, focusing on prevention rather than reaction - a critical element for their 24/7 direct to consumer business model. New Relic enables them to qualify and analyse systems that are beginning to degrade, allowing for intervention even before issues manifest to customers. In addition to improvements to MTTR and MTTD and a reduction in costs, New Relic has also contributed to a reduction in costs caused by outages, engineering efficiency and the resolution of bottlenecks.
Observability with New Relic is a crucial enabler for Acko when going live with new developments. No new service is launched without a corresponding New Relic dashboard in place, and this integration in the software development lifecycle ensures that monitoring is integrated from the outset; preventing surprises and reinforcing system resilience. The broad familiarity of New Relic within Acko’s engineering teams also translates directly into faster onboarding for new services and features, substantially improving time to market.
In a competitive and rapidly evolving digital insurance landscape, Acko's partnership with New Relic ensures they can maintain unwavering confidence in their complex, multi-cloud environment. The partnership allows Acko to continuously innovate, explore new product areas, and uphold the digital trust that is fundamental to their relationship with millions of customers, enabling them to reaffirm their position as one of India’s InsurTech industry leaders.
“Let's say a customer was stuck on the payment page for a very long period of time, at Acko, we want to know that early on so we can proactively fix it. That’s where New Relic plays a major role. New Relic’s APM helped us figure out a best practice system, which was easily scalable in other areas of insurance."
