Nesine manages traffic bursts to triumph digital customer experience

Minutes before a major event is scheduled to begin; online betting platforms experience sudden surges in traffic and betting volume as punters place their bets. While the largest surge is before the event starts, high traffic volumes continue throughout the event. It’s no wonder then that technical disruptions or slowdowns during these traffic peaks are the biggest nightmares for online betting companies.

Nesine.com relies on New Relic to help it deliver a high-quality, reliable online betting experience. As a leading provider of online sports betting in Turkey,  D Elektronik Şans Oyunları ve Yayıncılık A.Ş. operates as the brand Nesine.com. The company’s advanced iPhone and Android applications and its device-compatible mobile or desktop website enable customers to place bets on sporting events such as football, basketball, and tennis, watch sporting events live, read and watch expert commentary, and access information on match statistics. More than 90% of Nesine’s traffic comes from customers using mobile devices. 

Preparing for frequent traffic bursts

Sustaining Nesine’s position as the top betting company in Turkey requires a constant focus on the customer experience. "We are a customer-centric company, which for the IT department, means that the quality of our services is always the most important goal," says Koray Kabadayi, CTO of Nesine. "To provide uninterrupted service, even during tremendous bursts of traffic, we must identify and fix any issues before they impact our customers’ experience with our platform. That’s why we rely on New Relic for visibility and insight into performance and the experience."

Rifat Ergül is the software development manager at Nesine. He agrees that managing bursts of traffic is his team’s biggest and most enduring challenge. "For every event, the traffic comes all at once," he says. "New Relic is very important for us to make sure we can handle the traffic without latencies or problems that impact the customer experience."

Software quality is one of the reasons that Nesine develops and runs all its applications in-house. It has a team of more than 70 engineers, developers, administrators, and others, including a new DevOps department. The IT department uses New Relic to monitor latency between systems, transaction rates, concurrent visits or open connections, and other key metrics as well as track metrics for its service level agreements (SLAs).

Monitoring third-party services

While Nesine works to maintain quality and performance by developing and operating its custom applications in two on-premises data centers, it must still integrate with many third-party systems, such as major banks. The IT team needs to closely monitor these integrations to make sure the service quality of third-party systems does not negatively impact Nesine’s customer experience.

One of the largest, most critical integrations for Nesine is with the central betting system. "Because the betting business in Turkey is regulated by the central betting organization, we must connect with the centralized system to share betting information," says Kabadayi. When a major update of the central betting system was released, Nesine developed a custom application in New Relic to monitor and track response times and other metrics before and after the integration. "New Relic helps us optimize the performance of our integrations," says Ergül. 

The online betting industry is a common target of automated threats such as web scraping, where crawler bots collect data from websites and use it without consent. For Nesine, it’s essential to quickly identify and block scraping crawlers—as much to prevent them from impacting the customer experience as to deter the unauthorized usage of third-party data provided by Nesine to its customers.

Nesine uses New Relic and a New Relic API to help it identify and alert the team to web scraping activity. "Crawlers can exert a heavy load on our system, especially during live events," says Kabadayi. "We use New Relic alerts so that we can block the crawlers from scraping the data and impacting our performance."

Modernizing core systems

Nesine is halfway through its application modernization journey, as it rearchitects existing systems from a monolithic approach to a microservices architecture. This modernization journey also entails adopting new technology, including open source solutions, and transforming the team’s CI/CD pipelines. 

"Moving to microservices has been a major focus for our team, spanning more than 100 projects over the past two years," says Ergül. "Within the next two years, our plan is to ship all of our applications in the microservices architecture."

New Relic is deployed in every environment at Nesine, including testing, staging, preproduction, and production. Whenever a new service is implemented, it’s automatically instrumented for observability using New Relic.

"Attempting to create observability of application performance using internal resources is not an efficient approach," says Kabadayi. "Nor does it make sense to maintain a third-party system in our data centers. New Relic is the best cloud-based service available. It’s managed by an external company and is always improving."