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Zapier Aggregates Multiple Analytics in a Single Dashboard with the New Relic Platform
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Zapier, a company that enables non-technical users to push data between hundreds of web applications, was facing a challenge in automating and provisioning servers for optimal performance. The company's environment consisted of 50 Linux servers on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a Django application split across several servers, and a backend consisting of a dynamic number of celery task workers fed by messages published to a RabbitMQ cluster. They also maintained a number of internal web services on nginx in front of Gunicorn and Node.js processes. Redis handled simple key and value stores, with logging handled by Graylog2 and ElasticSearch. However, they realized that no level of automation would be sufficient without an effective monitoring solution in place. They needed a tool that could provide immediate alerts when something was breaking and could be easily implemented into their environment.
About The Customer
Zapier is a company founded in 2011 that enables non-technical users to push data between hundreds of web applications — including Salesforce, Basecamp and Gmail — without the need to write code or wrangle APIs. The objective of the company is to automate mundane tasks by connecting web applications. A user selects a series of triggers from web applications and, when the trigger occurs, a chosen action is launched. Together, the trigger and action are called a Zap. Each automatic Zap frees up a user’s time, enabling him or her to do more complex tasks and creative work. The company runs 50 Linux servers on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and their web frontend is a Django application split across several servers, with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) between them. The backend consists of a dynamic number of celery task workers fed by messages published to a RabbitMQ cluster. Zapier also maintains a number of internal web services on nginx in front of Gunicorn and Node.js processes. Redis handles simple key and value stores, with logging handled by Graylog2 and ElasticSearch.
The Solution
Zapier decided to use New Relic as their monitoring solution. New Relic was easy to implement and provided comprehensive monitoring of CPU utilization. It also provided greater insight into Zapier’s Django application through the use of the Python agent. The most useful feature for Zapier was the App Map, which provided a graphical representation of their entire ecosystem. This was particularly useful for Zapier as they integrated with more than 200 external services and made hundreds of millions of requests to third-party APIs every month. With the introduction of the New Relic Platform, Zapier was able to gain even greater visibility into all metrics relevant to their business. They used the RabbitMQ plugin to keep track of queue backlogs over time, the Memcached plugin to monitor the amount of memory and number of commands executed per second on cache nodes, and the Redis plugin to track the number of active connections to each Redis instance.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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