Forbes Media runs on New Relic to manage the digital side of the business and ensure the availability and performance of its software stack. The team started with New Relic APM and has grown to use infrastructure monitoring, browser monitoring, logs monitoring, and more. With New Relic, the Forbes Media engineering team can solve problems faster.
"When people think of Forbes, they tend to think of the print magazine, which is very much still a thing, but the digital side of the business is actually bigger than the print side these days,” says JD Weiner, director of DevOps at Forbes Media. “It is extremely important that the platform be available and performant.
"Technical metrics are not necessarily the ones that you care about. You don't necessarily care about memory usage or five-minute load on the system. What you care about is the metrics that matter to the business, and those are things like customer satisfaction metrics, and that's the direction we're moving in at Forbes.
"When we started using APM [application performance monitoring], it was to get better insight into some of our major applications and understand their performance requirements better. From there, we started using other components of the platform, like synthetics to test the availability of our site from around the world because a global reach is important to us. We started using browser because we wanted insight into how the site actually performed for real users. And we started using logs because we wanted to pull all of our data together into one place, including CDN access logs."
What I love about my job is that I get to solve interesting technical problems, and as a director, I get to solve interesting business and management problems. New Relic gives me the insight into both of these things so that I can solve problems more effectively.
