Case Study
Wellcentive Cuts Application Response Time
by Nearly 90% with Help from New Relic
Industry
Why New Relic
Healthcare IT
Granular insight into application performance, all the way down
Location
to the OS level
Roswell, Georgia
Highlights
Employees
of months
100+
• Improved application response time by nearly 90% in a matter
• Saved tens of thousands of dollars in hosting costs for sharing
Use Case
up-to-the-minute performance data
Comprehensive visibility across a complex,
• Enabled major return on the New Relic investment within the
HIPAA-compliant ecosystem
first year of use
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© Copyright 2014, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.
Wellcentive Cuts Application Response Time by Nearly 90% with Help from New Relic
Wellcentive specializes in population health management. The company’s cloud-based
solutions enable hospital systems and provider networks to run detailed, longitudinal analytics
across siloed EMR systems, ultimately increasing efficiency, improving profitability, and
delivering the best-possible care.
Wellcentive’s Java EE stack runs primarily on JBoss application servers. Their REST APIs are
built in Java. On the database side, Wellcentive runs almost entirely on MySQL.
Meeting SLAs at a Time of Exponential Growth
Wellcentive is on an exponential growth curve—and every time
the company acquires a new customer, its environment grows
more complex. “We can’t have a single OLTP database for all of our
customers,” explains Drew Borland, Director of Architecture and
Research at Wellcentive. “That’s a HIPAA compliance concern for us,
so we segment each customer’s data to avoid cross-pollination.”
Wellcentive also uses New Relic Insights to determine the origin of
emerging issues, whether those problems originate on the network,
the application server, or the database. “Logs can’t give you that kind
of information,” says Borland. “But with Insights, we can run an ad
hoc query and immediately see where we should be looking. Then
we have an engineer use the APM tool to dig into the code and
fix the problem.”
Hiring more system admins wasn’t the solution to Wellcentive’s
complex environments. Wellcentive needed people who not only
had strong development backgrounds, but who could also look into
application profiles and address performance issues. In short, the
company needed to create a DevOps team.
Meanwhile, Wellcentive began searching for the right performance
monitoring tool to optimize its DevOps efforts. Team members tried
out a couple of different options—but those solutions provided less
visibility than Wellcentive required.
As part of Borland’s implementation of DevOps practices, he established
a weekly service-level agreement (SLA) meeting to review performance
metrics. “Our goal was to have every page on our system respond in
“With New Relic, we’re able to get
a perspective on our performance
data that we simply didn’t have
before, all the way down to the
OS level. New Relic immediately
solved a lot of our business needs.”
Drew Borland
Director of Architecture and Research,
Wellcentive
under three seconds,” he says. “That’s where New Relic came in.”
Gaining Unprecedented Visibility Down to
the OS Level
“With New Relic, we’re able to get a perspective on our performance
Wellcentive depends on data from New Relic to inform its SLA
data that we simply didn’t have before, all the way down to the
meetings. Borland and his team have high standards for quality and
OS level,” says Borland. “New Relic immediately solved a lot of our
application performance. “We’re always looking at performance
business needs.”
data in real time,” says Borland. “In fact, we have a 55-inch TV screen
Today, the Wellcentive team relies on New Relic APM to monitor all of
its JBoss application servers. Apache and MySQL plugins from New
displaying response-time data all day long. Everyone on our DevOps
team knows exactly how important those numbers are.”
Relic Platform offer comprehensive visibility into server and database
Borland’s team also uses New Relic Insights to track real-time
performance within the New Relic dashboard.
performance page load times. Their dashboards include histograms
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© Copyright 2014, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.
Wellcentive Cuts Application Response Time by Nearly 90% with Help from New Relic
and charts that show response times, SLA misses, and page load
times for individual apps, which makes it faster and easier to prevent
or fix problems before they turn into a major issue.
A Dramatic Return on Investment in a Matter
of Months
Within its first year of using New Relic, Wellcentive made deep cuts
in average application response time, dropping from four seconds to
half a second—nearly a 90% improvement. “One of the things that
impresses me the most about New Relic is how quickly it churns
through terabytes of information,” says Borland. “We capture more
than 15 million patient records a day, so we have an appreciation for
how much data New Relic Insights receives, and how little latency
we experience. Because it consistently delivers that level of speed
and performance, we’re able to use real-time information to
dramatically cut the response time of every application across
our system.”
As a result, Wellcentive can identify issues at the virtualization
layer even faster than its hosting provider. “These days, our hosting
“We capture more than 15 million
patient records a day, so we
have an appreciation for how
much data New Relic Insights
receives, and how little latency
we experience. Because it
consistently delivers that level of
speed and performance, we’re
able to use real-time information
to dramatically cut the response
time of every application across
our system.”
Drew Borland
Director of Architecture and Research,
Wellcentive
provider sees us more like a partner than a customer,” says Borland.
“We’re the canary in their coalmine—able to alert them, hold them
accountable, and help them solve problems. And because we’re
able to provide them with such valuable data, we’ve saved tens of
thousands of dollars in hosting costs.”
About New Relic
New Relic is a software analytics company that makes sense of
billions of data points about millions of applications in real time.
Wellcentive also hopes to use New Relic Insights to assess how new
Our comprehensive SaaS-based solution provides one powerful
releases and versions of their software impact performance and
interface for web and native mobile applications and consolidates
usability, and to track end-to-end user activity across their applications.
“As we develop new features, we’ll want to capture usage patterns,”
the performance monitoring data for any chosen technology in your
environment. When your brand and customer experience depend
says Borland. “We plan to use Insights for that post-feature creation
on the performance of modern software, New Relic provides insight
business analysis. In doing so, I want to make sure that we’re using
into your overall performance. Learn more at newrelic.com.
the strength of our tools to help all of our teams, not just IT.”
As the company continues to grow at an astonishing rate, one of
Borland’s frustrations is that he has so little time to explore New Relic
further to gain even more value. “If I could add just one person to
our DevOps team,” he says, “it would be a dedicated Java expert who
simply stares at New Relic all day. The return on investment is
already so great that I’m willing to invest an entire employee to
immerse themselves in it.”
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© Copyright 2014, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.