BeenVerified Evolves from Startup to Major Player During Five-Year Relationship with New Relic

1. 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.
Environment
BeenVerified 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.
Challenges
When 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 Glance
INDUSTRY
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.

2. CASE STUDY: BEENVERIFIED
Solution
One 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 Amster
CTO, 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 Tulskie
Senior Software Engineer, BeenVerified

3. CASE STUDY: BEENVERIFIED
Results
New 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 Tulskie
Senior 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 Relic
New 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.