CASE STUDY: BEENVERIFIED

BeenVerified Evolves from Startup to Major Player During Five-Year Relationship with New Relic BeenVerified delivers easy, affordable access to public records by aggregating all available information — including

deeds, criminal records, and court documents — in an easy-to-use interface. The company offers a full range of web and

mobile apps to help ensure that everyone has instant access to high-quality data on demand.

EnvironmentBeenVerified runs primarily on Ruby, with select applications using Java, C and PHP. For hosting, the company relies

on a hybrid combination of bare-metal dedicated machines and the cloud.

ChallengesWhen BeenVerified opened for business in 2007, the

company had no easy way to gauge site performance.

“My email inbox was flooded with exception notifications,”

says Senior Software Engineer (and ‘Minister of Magic’)

Patrick Tulskie. “Like a lot of startups, we were totally

focused on getting our product out the door. But we didn’t

know if the engines were burning hot — we had almost

no visibility into any of that. Sure, we could log into each

machine to check the memory and CPU, but there was no

centralized dashboard for overall performance of the app.”

At a GlanceINDUSTRY

Online search

LOCATION

New York, New York

EMPLOYEES

20

USE CASE

Up-to-the-minute performance

metrics from multiple services in

a single pane of glass

WHY NEW RELIC

A wide variety of tools to provide

relevant data during each stage

of the company’s evolution

HIGHLIGHTS

• New Relic reduces anxiety in

a development environment that

averages 2.5 deployments per day

• New Relic boosts performance,

helping drop response times below

100 milliseconds

• The New Relic Platform offers one

central interface for most statistics

related to application performance

BeenVerified deploys on average 2.5 times per day.

CASE STUDY: BEENVERIFIED

SolutionOne year later, New Relic came on the scene and BeenVerified didn’t

hesitate to give the software a try. “We’ve been with New Relic since

2008,” says CTO Jason Amster. “From the very start, it gave us an obvious

performance kick. Since then, both our product and the New Relic

product have matured. New Relic offers a lot of different tools that, at

one time or another, have met our needs at each stage in our evolution.”

Today, the BeenVerified team uses New Relic in a number of ways, gaining

access to near real time metrics on error rates and response times —

and eliminating the need for the endless email notifications that once

filled Tulskie’s inbox. “New Relic is our first line of defense when an issue

arises,” says Tulskie. “It gives us a bird’s eye view, directing us to the

places where a deeper dive is necessary. The Transaction Traces feature

is especially helpful, because it shows us the five slowest transactions

at any given moment. We no longer need to break out UNIX-level informa-

tion or run a custom version of Ruby to trace those issues manually. We

can get to the root of the problem right there in the New Relic console.”

The BeenVerified team runs an extraordinarily agile environment that

relies on New Relic for visibility into every deployment. “We deploy an

average of 2.5 times per day, including weekends and vacations,” says

Amster. “Every time we do that, we have a New Relic screen up to make

sure that nothing’s wrong with our memory, our Apdex score or our

response times. We can compare the current deployment with past

deployments to see if an issue emerged in a previous release, or built up

over time, or whatever the case may be.”

Considering BeenVerified’s long history of success with New Relic, it

should come as little surprise that the company was excited to check

out the New Relic Platform. “New Relic approached me and asked

if I wanted to try the Resque plugin, which allows me to see Resque

metrics inside the New Relic interface,” says Tulskie. “I was immediately

interested and also wanted to try the Redis plugin. Then I looked at the

extensions page, and I got really excited, because there are so many

plugins that we can use: SendGrid, the F5 load balancer, Memcached,

MongoDB, nginx, Apache. For a long time I’ve been looking for one

central place where I can throw all my statistics. I haven’t found it quite

yet, but New Relic just came awfully close.”

“We have an aggressive development cycle. By seeing how the site performs immediately after a deployment, we feel more comfortable pushing code and deploying constantly. New Relic is a safety net that enables us to push a little harder, a little faster, without driving ourselves nuts.”

Jason AmsterCTO, BeenVerified

“New Relic is our first line of defense when an issue arises. It gives us a bird’s-eye view, directing us to the places where a deeper dive is necessary. The Transaction Traces feature is especially helpful, because it shows us the five slowest transactions at any given moment. We no longer need to break out UNIX-level information or run a custom version of Ruby to trace those issues manually. We can get to the root of the problem right there in the New Relic console.”

Patrick TulskieSenior Software Engineer, BeenVerified

CASE STUDY: BEENVERIFIED

ResultsNew Relic enhances productivity. “We have a term we like to use around

here — the ‘meat cloud,’” says Amster. “That means using your fingers to

figure out what’s going on. The less we’re in the meat cloud, the quicker

we get things done. Back in the early days, we’d get a hit on traffic and

we’d have no idea what caused the slowdown. All of us would scramble

to find the problem. Now we spend far less time tracking down bugs

based on vague hunches.”

New Relic reduces anxiety in a fast-paced, high pressure environment.

“We have an aggressive development cycle,” says Amster. “By seeing

how the site performs immediately after a deployment, we feel more

comfortable pushing code and deploying constantly. New Relic is a

safety net that enables us to push a little harder, a little faster, without

driving ourselves nuts.”

New Relic boosts performance, playing a major role in helping the

BeenVerified team achieve a significant acceleration in application

performance. “Our response time recently hit a longtime goal of sub-100

milliseconds,” says Tulskie. “For months prior to that, New Relic showed

us that we weren’t hitting that target. By using these tools to measure

our progress and find the sources of any delay, we finally managed to

make it happen.”

With the introduction of the New Relic Platform, BeenVerified sees even

more reason to admire a product they’ve embraced since its inception.

“A lot of companies want to keep their product tight,” says Amster. “But

with this platform, New Relic shows that it is committed to an open envi-

ronment and will let partners and users flesh things out by writing and/

or using plugins. We know first-hand that people find ways to use our

product in ways we couldn’t possibly predict. The key is to embrace that,

promote it and support it — and that’s exactly what New Relic is doing.”

“A lot of companies want to keep their product tight. But with this platform, New Relic shows that it wants to remain open and let users flesh things out. We know first-hand that people find ways to use our product in ways we couldn’t possibly predict. The key is to embrace that, promote it, and support it — and that’s exactly what New Relic is doing.”

Patrick TulskieSenior Software Engineer, BeenVerified

© Copyright 2013, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. 6.12.13

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.