Capillary ups its CX game with New Relic's full observability platform

Soma Tah

In todays’ age of instant gratification, managing customer experience (CX) has become crucial for brand reputation. Hence, it is important for brands to have a solution that provides them a 360-degree view of customers and inventory across all channels and helps them stitch together previously siloed customer journeys and build unified, cross-channel strategies that deliver a consistent, omnichannel experience.

Around 400+ marquee brands like Pizza Hut, PUMA, Bata, VF Brands, ABFRL, Valiram, Al Futtaim Group, Tata Group, Asics, HP, Abbott, and KFC trusts Capillary Technologies' AI-powered loyalty and customer engagement platform to deliver seamless consumer experiences. Over 500 Capillary associates across 10 global offices are continually innovating to find new ways for brands to make their consumers’ lives easier, and experiences memorable. But the rising demand and rapid global expansion needs rapid scaling as well, which again puts a strain on the existing systems and infrastructure.

Piyush Goel, Sr. VP of Engineering, Capillary Technologies explained, ”By 2018, we had already launched four global deployments, representing around 800 servers running across our different regions, as well as more than 120 microservices. We were anticipating expanding into two more regions. But, the team was using several older tools and logging frameworks to monitor their systems in an attempt to gain visibility across the stack resulting in a lot of back-and-forth and inefficient workflows. We were apprehensive of how far we would be able to go with our existing tools in terms of troubleshooting and debugging and giving a high uptime and availability to our customers. We needed a more professional platform.”

Instant visibility, instant troubleshooting

Capillary chose to consolidate its alerting infrastructure with New Relic One, a full-stack observability platform for all the software metrics, events, and logs. Some of the prominent customers of New Relic in India are Government of India for Aarogya Setu, and online learning platform Unacademy.

Deploying and onboarding New Relic One was swift and easy. Rohit Raveendran, Principal Architect at Capillary Technologies said, “New Relic’s query language, NRQL, was also easy to adopt because Capillary already used SQL extensively in its products. Devs soon started using the SDK to add custom attributes and enhance the application.”

Troubleshooting also became much easier. Capillary Architect Saurabh Kumar said, “ Previously, we used to go to multiple tools and then check the logs. After the addition of New Relic One, all these things became very simple for us because everything was consolidated under a single umbrella. The team can receive proactive alerts and notifications in the event of service degradation, and can respond and react much faster. Basically, we could identify the pattern first with the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) metrics through the transactions. If we want to dig into details, we can just go to the distributor tracing.”

There have been many occasions when Capillary collaborated with New Relic to swiftly identify issues before the business and its customers are impacted. One of the tools that works brilliantly is the thread profiler which is a low-impact profiling tool used in production to identify bottlenecks in an application. Using the thread profiler we were able to identify the exact object that was causing issues.

Saurabh recalls another incident where New Relic One saved the day. “We had incurred higher load balancing costs of about 40 percent (more) than usual, and it was due to a bug that was never caught. New Relic One helped with identifying that particular traffic pattern and the particular end-point causing the anomaly,” he said.

“In another situation, one of their servers was continuously going down for a few hours. With the New Relic One dashboard we could see where the bottleneck was coming from. We identified that there’s a pattern to the problem – traffic had increased due to one particular merchant who had just gone live on our platform. We were able to determine that the merchant had launched a very lucrative promotion, but because of a bad integration, they ended up bombarding our systems heavily,” Rohit said.

The dev team at Capillary has also enhanced communication and awareness across the organization by creating and configuring custom dashboards for product managers.

"They also log in from time to time and see how their products are faring across global regions. At the leadership level, we don't want to look into every operational or service level item; we are more interested in the overall SLO (service level objective) and product health. We have created and configured dashboards accordingly - within a matter of five to ten minutes, we get all the information we need. And we can work with the teams to prioritize the work and help them make decisions and plan better," Piyush explained.

Image: New Relic Navigator 

(The health of each application, service, container, function and host is displayed in traffic light colors so users can quickly and easily investigate large numbers of entities to understand the real-time, at-a-glance health of all entities)

Key Benefits:

Embracing New Relic One, has helped Capillary to positively impact millions of dollars in revenue for its customers. One of the criticalities for Capillary’s customers is when it comes to sale events as these frequently see a five to ten times spike in traffic and activity. With New Relic One, Capillary can prepare for the events by adding more capacity, tightening alerts and monitoring, and ensuring that customers have a successful event.

In one particular instance, New Relic One was instrumental in helping Capillary quickly identify issues that heavily impacted a key customer’s campaign performance. As a result, this client not only renewed a lucrative contract with Capillary but saw a growth in their key business KPI by five times its original value.

Troubleshooting: Overall, New Relic One has delivered a 75-80% improvement on troubleshooting times. What previously took around an hour has now been cut to just ten minutes. New Relic One’s ability to correlate across services and systems is powering this efficiency, saving considerable time and money.

Uptime and platform stability: Uptime and platform stability have also improved significantly, from 99.5% uptime to consistently hitting 99.9%. This is what many large enterprise customers demand now, so it’s vital that Capillary can deliver it.

Ben Goodman, SVP- Sales and General Manager for New Relic, APAC and Japan said, "The benefits in performance and platform stability experienced by Capillary Technologies is a prime example of how New Relic helps our customers to deliver unparalleled digital experiences. The deployment of New Relic One, coupled with best-of-breed observability practices, has delivered a remarkable increase in uptime and platform stability, translating into tangible business benefits including operational efficiency improvements (saving time and money) and growth in Capillary’s quarterly NPS score.”