Watch Duty Uses New Relic for Wildfire Defense

Watch Duty, a service powered by dedicated volunteers, delivers real-time wildfire information to affected communities. Facing the challenges of urgency and accuracy, they turned to New Relic's intelligent observability platform to ensure their critical services remain operational and meet escalating demands.

With New Relic, Watch Duty gains at-a-glance insights into application and system performance, complemented by granular data like real-time logs and error reports. This enables their developers to proactively address issues before user impact. During the February 2025 California fires, Watch Duty scaled to support 1.5 million concurrent users, a tenfold increase from the previous year. New Relic's alerting capabilities, refined to filter out noise and focus on critical anomalies, proved invaluable in maintaining system stability during peak usage.

Staff Engineer Josh Frederick leverages New Relic dashboards to pinpoint areas needing attention. He uses logs for targeted investigations and transactions for broader problem discovery, transitioning to distributed tracing for in-depth analysis. The team also utilizes New Relic's integrations with Fastly to observe and optimize their caching strategy, which is crucial for managing API traffic and ensuring scalability.

By leveraging New Relic, Watch Duty ensures reliable service during critical times, delivering essential data to communities facing wildfire risks. New Relic empowers Watch Duty to focus on their core mission: providing timely and accurate wildfire information to those who need it most.

Value Results:

• Supported 1.5M+ concurrent users during peak fire events.

• Identified and resolved performance bottlenecks in real-time, ensuring uninterrupted service.

• Improved alert accuracy, reducing noise and enabling faster response to critical issues.

• Enhanced API performance through optimized caching strategies, scaling to handle increased traffic.

• Empowered a small team to operate with the efficiency of a full-scale tech company.