HolidayCheck accelerates issue resolution with New Relic

HolidayCheck, a leading digital content provider in Germany and a subsidiary of Tomorrow Focus AG, operates in 10 countries, offering a platform where 25 million monthly visitors browse 11 million reviews and millions of user-generated photos and videos covering over 500,000 hotels. Experiencing double-digit yearly growth, HolidayCheck faced significant operational challenges in maintaining its infrastructure, which was previously hosted in a managed environment with limited visibility into application behavior.

To address these challenges, HolidayCheck sought a software analytics solution that provided end-to-end visibility across their technology stack, supported multiple development languages, and offered a common set of metrics for development and operations teams to improve collaboration. The primary goal was to resolve performance issues faster and prevent future occurrences, particularly in anticipation of peak travel booking seasons. New Relic emerged as the solution, providing HolidayCheck with application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, and mobile monitoring capabilities.

With New Relic, HolidayCheck gained the ability to monitor both their older, LAMP-based applications and newer Scala and Node.js services running on Amazon Web Services. This comprehensive monitoring is particularly crucial during peak seasons when traffic triples. New Relic enables HolidayCheck to conduct load testing, plan capacity needs, and address bottlenecks proactively, ensuring a seamless customer experience even during high-demand periods. The unified interface allows operations, development, and quality assurance teams to visualize performance and customer experience across the entire technology stack, fostering better collaboration and faster problem resolution.

Robert Jacob, Senior Software Developer at HolidayCheck, emphasizes the time-saving benefits of New Relic, highlighting the ability to quickly identify the root cause of performance issues, whether in the native mobile application, backend, or third-party service. Maximilian Schöfmann, Head of Operations at HolidayCheck, notes the significant improvement in mean time to resolution (MTTR), reducing it from half a day or more to just minutes. This efficiency allows developers to focus on coding new features and optimizing application performance proactively.

Value Results:

• Reduced Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR): From half a day to minutes, enabling faster problem resolution.

• Improved Collaboration: A unified interface fosters better collaboration between operations, development, and quality assurance teams.

• Proactive Optimization: Identification and planning of optimizations, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

• Confidence in Code Releases: Frequent code releases with confidence due to improved monitoring and visibility.

• Enhanced Capacity Planning: Effective load testing and capacity planning, particularly during peak seasons.