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Mural.ly Scales to Accommodate Rapid Growth on Azure Platform with Help from New Relic
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Remote Collaboration
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Mural.ly, a collaboration suite that helps creative teams work better together, was facing challenges in monitoring its rapidly growing user base. The company launched in September 2012 and, in just nine months, grew to serve 125,000 users in 161 countries. High performance was critical to its continued success. The company was getting a lot of exposure in tech media outlets, so its traffic came in unpredictable bursts. If the platform was not up and running, first-time visitors probably wouldn’t give it a second chance. In its first few months, Mural.ly experimented with different platform configurations to determine the right environment for accommodating its rapid growth. The company finally settled on Windows Azure Web Sites, a rapid development offering that lets companies create and deploy web apps in seconds using ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js.
About The Customer
Mural.ly is a company that offers a collaboration suite designed to help creative teams work better together. The core of its offering are 'murals' – online zoomable walls with web content (videos, links, photos and more) where users can visualize, imagine, show and discuss ideas, and then access and work on them at any time from anywhere. The company was launched in September 2012 and within nine months, it grew to serve 125,000 users in 161 countries. Mural.ly is a Node.js web application running on the Windows Azure Web Sites platform. The company is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina and has nine employees.
The Solution
Mural.ly decided to use New Relic for monitoring its performance both at the platform level and the application level. The installation process was nearly instantaneous. Mural.ly added one line of code on top of their main application file and it just started working. The Mural.ly team now uses New Relic to monitor performance both at the platform level and the application level. They look at the performance of the Windows Azure Web Sites platform, monitoring their deployments and their infrastructure — how the load balancer works, how many requests they serve per machine, and so forth. At the same time, they’re looking at the performance of their Node.js app. How many exceptions are they seeing? Sluggish queries? Slow routes? By seeing both of those perspectives at once, they get a complete picture of their overall performance from moment to moment.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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