CURE.org Creates Roadmap for Improving App Performance with New Relic Data - Wordpress

1. 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

2. Challenges
With 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.
Solution
Worrall 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 Worrall
CTO, CURE

3. 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.”
Results
New 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 Worrall
CTO, CURE

4. © Copyright 2013, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. 5.21.13
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.
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.