AI Case Study

"Ocado offers OSP - the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), an end-to-end e-commerce solution, as a managed service capability to partners internationally, enabling them to build sustainable, scalable, and profitable online grocery businesses in their own markets.

New Relic’s Digital Intelligence Platform was introduced to support Ocado's migration to AWS, including integrating well over 100 microservice applications into the OSP platform. New Relic APM provided the extra visibility into our systems and platforms, identifying anomalies and alerting before the impact was widespread. New Relic's platform also provides assistance in Root Cause Analysis.

New Relic provides a central overview and a common communication tool for developers irrespective of technology.

New Relic’s Digital Intelligence Platform was introduced to support the cloud migration, including integrating well over 100 microservice applications into the OSP platform. New Relic acted very much as a ‘security blanket,’ as Thomas termed it: ‘New Relic APM provided the extra visibility into our systems and platforms, which we needed. It gave us confidence that our migration was going as expected, and, if not, we were in a very good position to address any issues early. We learned lots about cloud architecture, and it was great having New Relic there to reassure us nothing was quietly going wrong behind the scenes.’

New Relic became more pervasive within Ocado and is now often used to pinpoint the root cause of any performance issues. A notable example was when one of the OSP backend systems showed a gradual performance degradation that was in danger of impacting customer orders. Customer satisfaction is vitally important for Ocado, and a lot of effort was spent on finding out what was wrong. Confusingly, different systems that were seemingly unconnected were affected. It wasn’t until an engineer used New Relic Insights to represent the problem that it became clear that although the database systems were all different, they were hosted on the same physical machine, which was the root cause of the problem.

‘New Relic made it easy for us to visualise and track this issue in real time’, says Thomas. ‘It helped resolve this particular problem a lot faster than we could otherwise have done.’"