1.
Paul Kiddie @pkiddie
@ttl_engineering
New Relic in action at Trainline

2.
What we do

3.
What we do
Train companies
Small business
Mobile AppsConsumer
Website
Services

4.
Some vitals
• ~40 Environments
• over 1000 servers
• over 100 products
• Windows/.NET
• New Relic .NET agent / Server Monitor
• Automation is key!

5.
Before New Relic
• Application errors logged to disk
• Production support team look at logs
– After production issue identified from customer
reports
– After platform release to check change in patterns
• Ad-hoc and reactive
• Errors difficult to reproduce as usually hours/
days after the event and out of context

6.
Introducing New Relic at Trainline
• Zero capital outlay, subscription model, up and
running in an hour
• Identified a product: leisure website
• Continuous delivery pipeline with blue/green
deployments to all environments
• Needed solution for continuous monitoring

7.
Introducing New Relic at Trainline
• New Relic agent / server monitor part of
application server image
• Deployed with high security enabled
• Out of the box
– Near-real time error logging / alerting
– Application / end-user performance
– Deployment markers
– User funnels

8.
Immediate value
• Error rate as a team key performance
indicator
• Drive down error rate through weekly health
checks
• Remediate top three errors by adding directly
to dev team backlog
• Stack traces visible and actionable by
developers without further analysis

9.
https://api.newrelic.com/v2/applications/{application_id}/metrics/data.json

10.
Taking it further
• Roll out New Relic across all machines in all
environments
– New Relic installed on base images for new
machines
– Else use SCCM to manage installation
Application/server monitoring built in and
zero effort for dev teams

11.
Taking it further
ü Custom attributes
• Mimic high security mode in newrelic.config
– Create and deploy Chocolatey package through Chef /
SCCM
• Observations:
– New Relic .NET agent doesn’t check in to verify
highSecurity setting matches once it has started
<highSecurity enabled=“true” />

12.
More value…
• Use custom attributes to augment Transaction
and PageView events with more information
to form other business metrics.
• Phoenix’s real-time payments dashboard
– Spread of payment methods
– Effect of payment outages

13.
How Trainline uses New Relic
• Monitoring/Production Support for near
real time running health of system
• Product owners home in and use funnels to
prioritise product effort and spend
• Developers get rapid feedback on new
features
• Management get a holistic view of the
system through the map feature

14.
What we’d like to see we’ll be seeing
soon
ü Javascript errors in Insights
ü node.js application errors in Insights
ü Better Javascript stack traces
• Per application retention period in Insights
• Full .NET async support

15.
What’s next
• More custom attributes!
• Develop, run and monitor Node web apps in
production
– use New Relic node.js agent
– different deployment model, bundle agent/config
with the app
• AWS migration.