Virgin Australia has expanded visibility across its stack, reducing time spent finding and resolving incidents and giving developers more time to work on new projects.
The airline adopted New Relic’s observability platform in 2020 and by 2022 had integrated it across its mobile applications, websites, and containerised workloads,
Virgin Australia’s head of infrastructure and support Simon Lawrence told iTnews that the company also started using New Relic’s log management tool this year, which uses machine learning to identify outliers in large volumes of log data and cluster them into patterns.
“It aggregates logs and allows us to search those logs across the stack in a single place, graph various things and monitor applications, identify vulnerabilities or bugs,” he said.
“It also allows us to hold onto those logs for longer and export them out easily.”
Lawrence said New Relic’s application performance monitoring and smart deviation detection had “reduced noise and the time required to configure actionable alerting, allowing us to get on the front foot to proactively detect, respond and resolve incidents.
“We had one reasonably recent issue where an API was triggered. This created a large message queue, leading to downstream slowness,” he said.
Virgin’s different IT teams operate in very unique environments because of the airline’s diverse technology stack.
Lawrence said that meant shared access to organisation-wide, real-time data via New Relic’s dashboard made identifying and resolving incidents much faster.
“In an airline everything’s complicated, [and] everything connects with everything,” he said.
“Normally in the past when you had a problem you’d get five or six people from different areas who’d say what they were monitoring, but now they’re all seeing each others’ environments and how it’s resolving itself and where the issue is.”
Lawrence said that getting ahead of issues as soon as they arose minimised any impact on the end-user experience.
“The less issues in our applications the more seamless the customer experience is,” he said.
Another benefit of cutting the time developers spend on manual troubleshooting is reinvesting it in new projects, Lawrence said.
“We’ve released many enhancements to the mobile application,” he said.
“We’ve also released our middle-seat lottery, which the [airline] industry had not seen before.”