Ryanair Soars with New Relic's Real-Time Data

Ryanair, Europe's leading airline for low fares and high punctuality, serves nearly 120 million passengers annually with over 1,800 daily flights across 34 countries. With prices as low as $6.23 for a one-way ticket, their website is a critical platform, attracting over 1.3 million daily visitors. The challenge? Ensuring the website's peak performance to facilitate bookings, check-ins, and other essential services. Previously, Declan Costello, infrastructure and operations manager at Ryanair, and his team lacked deep insights into website performance, struggling to pinpoint the root causes of slowdowns and errors.

Enter New Relic. Initially tested on Ryanair's mobile site, New Relic quickly became the go-to solution for comprehensive performance data across IT and business teams. Costello's team now relies on New Relic as their single source of truth, with real-time dashboards displayed on multiple screens throughout their office. This includes all developers having access, with every environment fully instrumented from development to production.

Beyond basic troubleshooting, Ryanair leverages New Relic to monitor critical metrics such as online check-ins, flight availability searches, payment response times, and fraud attempt detection. Using New Relic Query Language (NRQL), they can rapidly analyze complex system behaviors, identify performance bottlenecks in third-party services, and even detect and mitigate cyberattacks, particularly screen scraping activities. These capabilities have transformed Ryanair's operational efficiency and security posture.

The adoption of New Relic has led to a more self-sufficient and responsive IT operations team. By empowering them to independently monitor performance and diagnose issues in real-time, Ryanair has significantly enhanced its ability to support an increasingly complex infrastructure. Before New Relic it was impossible to troubleshoot the environment. Now, Ryanair continues to improve customer experience and deliver on the company’s motto ‘Always Getting Better’.

Value Results:

• Real-time Insights: Achieved a single, global source of truth for website performance, replacing outdated manual data collection methods.

• Improved Troubleshooting: Enhanced ability to rapidly diagnose and resolve performance issues across the website and integrated third-party services.

• Enhanced Security: Improved detection and mitigation of cyberattacks, including screen scraping, and identification of fraudulent payment attempts.

• Increased Efficiency: Empowered the IT operations team to support a more complex infrastructure with the same team size, leading to greater self-sufficiency.

• Data-Driven Decisions: Enabled real-time monitoring of key business metrics, such as seats sold, informing strategic decisions across various departments.