CURE.org Creates Roadmap for Improving App Performance with New Relic Data - Wordpress
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CURE.org Creates Roadmap for Improving App Performance with New Relic Data More than 100 million children in the developing world suffer from physical disabilities that can be cured through surgery. And that’s where CURE comes in. Through its nonprofit network of charitable hospitals and surgical programs, CURE provides treatment for children with conditions like clubfoot, bowed legs, cleft lips, untreated burns, and hydrocephalus. The organization opened its first hospital in Kenya in 1998 and since then CURE physicians have seen more than 1.9 million patients, provided over 138,000 life-changing surgeries and trained 6,100 medical professionals. Environment With a longstanding commitment to technical innovation, CURE actively encourages fellow nonprofits to explore low cost, high performance commercial alternatives to industry specific platforms and applications. CURE runs on Linux servers, with MySQL as the backend database and PHP as the server-side scripting language. The public facing website is built on WordPress and hosted on Rackspace, with a frontend written in HTML5 and JavaScript. CURE also maintains a patient record database system backended by WordPress and front- ended by a Sencha interface on Google Chromebooks. The organization favors open source solutions and provides critical guidance to other nonprofits by contributing code to the open source community. At a Glance INDUSTRY Nonprofit LOCATION Lemoyne, Pennsylvania EMPLOYEES 35 in the U.S.; 1,500 globally, primarily in developing nations USE CASE Monitor performance of public-facing website, internal database, and CUREkids mobile app WHY NEW RELIC Comprehensive performance monitoring down to the line of code HIGHLIGHTS • Using Transaction Traces, CURE diagnosed a ‘mystery’ problem that caused intermittent short outages to a single page request taking 30 seconds to load, with 99% of that time spent in one specific common function • Using New Relic for Mobile Apps for development and real time monitoring of a new CUREkids app, which allows donors to track patient updates in real time and send ‘get well’ messages to patients around the world • Implementing a site ‘fitness plan’, 100% driven by data from New Relic CASE STUDY: CURE
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CURE.org Creates Roadmap for Improving App Performance with New Relic DataMore than 100 million children in the developing world suffer from physical disabilities that can be cured through surgery. And that’s where CURE comes in. Through its nonprofit network of charitable hospitals and surgical programs, CURE provides treatment for children with conditions like clubfoot, bowed legs, cleft lips, untreated
burns, and hydrocephalus. The organization opened its first hospital in Kenya in 1998 and since then CURE physicians have seen more than 1.9 million patients, provided over 138,000 life-changing surgeries and trained 6,100 medical professionals.
EnvironmentWith a longstanding commitment to technical innovation, CURE actively encourages fellow nonprofits to explore low cost, high performance commercial alternatives to industry specific platforms and applications.
CURE runs on Linux servers, with MySQL as the backend database and PHP as the server-side scripting language. The public facing website is built on WordPress and hosted on Rackspace, with a frontend written in HTML5
and JavaScript. CURE also maintains a patient record database system backended by WordPress and front-ended by a Sencha interface on Google Chromebooks.
The organization favors open source solutions and provides critical guidance to other nonprofits by contributing code to the open source community.
At a GlanceINDUSTRY Nonprofit
LOCATION Lemoyne, Pennsylvania
EMPLOYEES 35 in the U.S.; 1,500 globally, primarily in developing nations
USE CASE Monitor performance of public-facing website, internal database, and CUREkids mobile app
WHY NEW RELIC Comprehensive performance monitoring down to the line of code
HIGHLIGHTS • Using Transaction Traces, CURE diagnosed a ‘mystery’ problem that caused intermittent short outages to a single page request taking 30 seconds to load, with 99% of that time spent in one specific common function
• Using New Relic for Mobile Apps for development and real time monitoring of a new CUREkids app, which allows donors to track patient updates in real time and send ‘get well’ messages to patients around the world
• Implementing a site ‘fitness plan’, 100% driven by data from New Relic
ChallengesWith only 35 employees in its Pennsylvania headquarters and an additional 1,500 working in dozens of countries around the world, CURE maintains a small domestic footprint with a massive global reach. “As in most nonprofits, efficiency isn’t just a nice thing to have
— it’s absolutely critical,” says Joel Worrall, CTO at CURE. “We keep our central operations as minimal and efficient as possible, because we want to focus our energy and resources on helping disabled kids. As a result, we have a very small IT team (four people to be exact). Hiring more IT people simply isn’t an option.”
The CURE.org website is the linchpin of the organization’s complex global operation. Not only is the site the primary channel for fundraising, but it also serves as the main communication link between headquarters and CURE’s sprawling network of donors and partners around the world.
Global vision calls for global scale. As the organization expanded its operations worldwide – attracting increased media attention at the same time – the CURE.org site began to experience bursts in traffic that Worrall and his team found challenging to manage. “Up until 2012, we could get by with a few homegrown monitoring solutions,” he says.
“But our patchwork approach couldn’t scale to meet our growth in traffic. The demands of what we do, and the number of people we serve, led us to explore a more robust approach to monitoring.”
One issue in particular prompted Worrall to seek out a more powerful, comprehensive toolkit for diagnosing problems on the CURE.org website. “We were experiencing random outages,” he says. “The outages were infrequent and very short in duration, but we couldn’t reproduce them. Nothing in test or dev gave us any insight. Since we couldn’t understand the issue, we had no way of knowing if it might be the sign of a much more significant problem. We needed better tools to point us to the root cause.”
In May 2013, the company launched CUREkids, its first native iOS app. From the start, the team knew it needed to accurately monitor app performance.
SolutionWorrall decided to try the free version of New Relic and immediately gained greater insight into the CURE environment. “The free lite version provides some of the key New Relic capabilities, like error reporting and server resource monitoring,” he says. “All of that was really helpful and
easily beat the homegrown solutions we were using. But we still weren’t able to identify the source of those mystery outages. For that, we needed diagnostics that would allow us to dig down to the transaction level.”
CASE STUDY: CURE
“… with New Relic, finding the source of an issue is almost instant. That alone saves us hours each week, and sometimes hours every day.” Joel WorrallCTO, CURE
An upgrade to New Relic Pro quickly followed. CURE now depends on New Relic to monitor the WordPress installation running its website, along with the patient database used by surgeons in the field to track patient outcomes. “We no longer need to cobble together a few solutions in order to get full visibility into our global environment,” says Worrall.
“We can consolidate everything into this one tool. Nothing else comes close to providing the level of insight we get from New Relic.”
Worrall depends on a number of New Relic features — including app availability alerts and reporting capabilities — but Transaction Traces are proving to be the most valuable of all. “Within the first week of upgrading to Pro, we identified and fixed a half-dozen issues that we didn’t even know were there,” he says. “That’s because we were able to drill far deeper into our environment than ever before, getting details on any transaction all the way down to the SQL.”
CURE started using New Relic for Mobile when they started developing CUREkids. The integration was surprisingly straightforward – it took
only an hour to bake the monitoring into their new mobile platform. “New Relic for Mobile helped us accelerate the testing of the app,” said Worrall, “and it’s helping us deliver consistent high performance, improve our mobile engagement experience and optimize our devel-opment resources. New Relic has proven to be essential to us — both in our web app and in our new mobile app. It’s critical for our team and helps us get a lot more done on a very small budget.”
ResultsNew Relic saves CURE huge amounts of time. “Previously, we would diagnose problems by going into the boxes and manually searching the logs,” says Worrall. “Now with New Relic, finding the source of an issue is almost instant. That alone saves us hours each week and sometimes hours every day.”
The mystery outages that troubled Worrall and his team for so long are no longer a mystery. “New Relic immediately pointed me to the exact function that was causing the problem,” he says. “The trace functionality
showed that a few variable page requests were taking 30 seconds to load and 99% of that time was spent in one specific, common function. Two days later, we had eliminated the down events caused by this issue and had identified a task list of a half-dozen other items to improve the reliability and responsiveness of the site. Today, we’re implementing a ‘fitness plan’ for our site that’s being 100% driven by data from New Relic.”
Recently, the CURE team released their CUREkids mobile app. It allows users to follow a patient’s progress before and after surgery as well as
CASE STUDY: CURE
“We no longer need to cobble together a few solutions in order to get full visibility into our global environment. We can consolidate everything into this one tool. Nothing else comes close to providing the level of insight we get from New Relic.”Joel WorrallCTO, CURE
About New RelicNew Relic is an all-in-one SaaS-based application performance management solution that provides comprehensive, real time visibility into web and mobile applications regardless of where they’re run. Our platform combines Real User Monitoring, web monitoring, server monitoring, and iOS and Android mobile monitoring in one powerful dashboard experience. Our 40,000+ customers use our cloud solution every day to optimize over 108 billion daily performance metrics. Learn more at: newrelic.com.
through the recovery process. Through the app, users can also send ‘get well’ wishes and other encouraging messages to patients around the world. To ensure the app is successful, the team knows it must always be available and running at top performance. Thanks to New Relic for Mobile Apps, the CURE team is making informed decisions as they try to push the standards for nonprofit communication and donor engagement.
Maintaining a lean organization — and providing maximum support to people in the field — means choosing smart operational tools. In a very short period of time, New Relic has already become a key component in CURE’s innovative, efficient global tech operation. “If our website isn’t working, then our organization isn’t working,” says Worrall. “Without it, our communication with folks in the field would be severely limited. And just as importantly, every outage affects our fundraising efforts. People don’t generally go wandering around the Internet looking for opportunities to give away money. Instead, they’re often struck by a desire to donate, and if we’re unable to process their donation in that moment of unplanned generosity, then we may lose them altogether. Every outage represents a missed opportunity to engage with internal
stakeholders, reach potential donors, and of course help kids all over the world. New Relic helps us keep those outages to a minimum.”
With in-depth, real time intelligence from New Relic, the CURE team can create a roadmap for improving performance in the long term.
“With this tool, we’ve already uncovered usage patterns that require us to think differently about issues on the site,” says Worrall. “Thanks to New Relic, we have a clear idea of what we need to do in order to improve performance in the coming year. That’s invaluable. For us, New Relic isn’t simply about discovering what happened on our site yesterday, or even what’s happening right now. It’s also about helping us define a path for the future.”
CASE STUDY: CURE
New Relic instantly identifies the causes of performance issues.
