Paul is part of the web team responsible for delivering the responsive, touch friendly trainline website you see today. He'll take you on their journey from zero to full monitoring of all trainline products with New Relic and sharing how they overcame some of the challenges they had along the way during the rollout. Paul will also take you fellow data nerds through some of the insights they've gathered by using New Relic to measure and improve at lightning speed, improving the end user experience, and the bottom line. Presented at New Relic FutureStack2015.

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

9. 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

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

11. 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

12. 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” />

13. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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.