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Case Study

Move, Inc. Achieves Continuous Deployment in QA Environment with Help from New RelicIndustryOnline real estate service

LocationSan Jose, California

Employees1,000

Use CaseMonitoring of application performance across heterogeneous stack

Why New RelicEasy implementation, comprehensive insight, and a minimal learning curve

Highlights• Achieved an 82% reduction in production error rate over the

course of six months

• Gained the necessary insights in both test and production to pursue an agile approach to development

• Improved productivity across all development teams, freeing up more time and resources to focus on core projects

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Move, Inc. Achieves Continuous Deployment in QA Environment with Help from New Relic

immediately deployed a five-server installation on its realtor.com®

website. “Right from the start, we found a customer-facing issue in

production that we were able to resolve in a few minutes,” said Nick

Steel, senior manager of systems engineering for Move. “Without

New Relic, we would have needed several more hours to find the same

problem, let alone resolve it.”

With a quick win right out of the gate, New Relic succeeded in becom-

ing the companywide standard in no time, expanding to monitor

more than 25 applications in a matter of months. Meanwhile, a growing

number of employees in every part of the company began using

New Relic data to facilitate smarter decision making. “It only takes us

about 10 or 15 minutes to install a New Relic agent,” Steel said. “We

need another 15 minutes, on average, to train a new colleague on

Move, Inc. is the company behind the Move Network, a group of real estate websites that attracts more than 30 million visitors every month. The company operates realtor.com®, the o!cial website of the National Association of REALTORS®, which connects people to the essential, accurate information needed to identify their perfect home and to the REALTORS® whose expertise guides consumers through buying and selling.

The environment runs on a wide range of technologies within a heterogeneous stack, including .NET, C#, PHP, and Ruby. The company’s back-end relies on a combination of Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and Apache Solr.

“Our ultimate goal is continuous deployment on all fronts, where we simply aren’t afraid to release anything. New Relic will help us get there because it shows us very clearly how any update in our test environment will behave when it is actually in production.”

Dave ArguellesDirector of Quality AssuranceMove, Inc.

Limited Visibility Across a Wide Range of Interdependent Systems

For years, the complexity of Move’s technology stack made perfor-

mance issues di!cult to diagnose, let alone resolve. “There are a lot

of interdependencies among our various systems,” says Niti Sharma,

senior web developer for Move. “Whenever we encountered a cascad-

ing failure, our old monitoring tools usually couldn’t give us enough

granularity to see which system fell first. It could take us hours or days,

sometimes as long as a week, to discover the problem in the first

place — then a few more days to resolve it.”

Ine"ective monitoring was a particular challenge for the company’s QA

team. “Realtor.com has a lot more moving parts than your typical

website,” says Dave Arguelles, director of quality assurance at Move.

“There’s a lot that can go wrong, and it’s absolutely critical for the

data to be completely accurate when potential homeowners are look-

ing for a place to live.”

The Move team attempted to meet these challenges by relying on a

combination of commercial monitoring systems, open source tech-

nologies, and applications developed in house. Yet no single solution

could provide either the depth or breadth that the company required

to achieve fast, e"ective remediation of performance issues in such a

heterogeneous environment.

New Relic Quickly Becomes the Companywide Standard

A new approach to monitoring came to Move’s attention in 2013, when

a team of developers began experimenting with New Relic APM,

Server and Browser monitoring to generate impressive data-driven

insights within Heroku. The results were so promising that Move

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Move, Inc. Achieves Continuous Deployment in QA Environment with Help from New Relic

how to use the solution for generating useful information. In other

words, this is a technology with almost zero learning curve.”

Move employees are especially enthusiastic about the dashboard

feature in New Relic. In fact, the company installed nearly 20 large

monitors companywide to display the latest New Relic data, with

each monitor customized to show the metrics that are most relevant

to the teams sitting nearby. The monitors are even lit to indicate the

current status of each application —green when everything is running

well, red when there’s a problem. The change in color is activated

when the New Relic Apdex score falls below a certain threshold on

any Move application.

Other New Relic features are just as critical for keeping the Move

team up to speed on the latest performance data. For example, New

Relic Browser measures site responsiveness from the end user’s

perspective, giving developers new insight into the e"ectiveness of

the latest changes in production. The App Map feature o"ers deep

insight into the interactions of all the components across the Move

environment, including third-party applications that might be ad-

versely a"ecting performance. With Transaction Tracing, the Move

team can follow the source of any problem down to the line of

code, definitively identifying the root cause for faster resolution.

In recent days, Move developers have begun experimenting with

the Thread Profiling feature in New Relic, which o"ers impressively

clear visibility into the status of the CLR process pipeline across the

company’s .NET stack. “All of these features work together to give

us an unprecedented level of insight into the health of our various

websites,” said Daniel Woods, vice president of engineering for con-

sumer services sites and applications for Move. “With New Relic, it’s

all about isolating the problem so we can understand how to solve it

without confusion or delay.”

Bridging the Gap Between Development and Operations

In the first six months of using New Relic to monitor the company’s

large network of sites, Move has achieved an astonishing 82% drop in

its production error rate. According to Steel, the main driver for such

a dramatic change is the proactive stance enabled by New Relic

technology. “We hardly ever get calls from our support centers any-

more,” he said. “With this solution, we can usually stay one step

ahead of emerging issues, and our average time to resolution is less

than 20 minutes. Another nice benefit is that everyone’s a little

calmer around the o!ce, because we’re rarely in firefighting mode

these days.”

As Move continues its aggressive transition toward an agile develop-

ment environment, New Relic will play an especially valuable role

by giving teams a more thorough understanding of QA cycles. “We’re

constantly pushing our test function closer and closer to our de-

velopment function,” said Arguelles. “Production releases happen once

or twice a day, but test releases happen almost constantly. Our

ultimate goal is continuous deployment on all fronts, where we simply

aren’t afraid to release anything. New Relic will help us get there,

because it shows us very clearly how any update in our test environ-

ment will behave when it’s actually in production.”

By gaining so much speed and flexibility in the deployment of new

features, the Move team has seen a considerable increase in pro-

ductivity on every development team. “We’re doing less scrambling

because we’re not solving as many urgent performance problems,

and that enables us to do more planning,” said Woods. “Everyone’s

more e!cient as a result. Best of all, New Relic frees our developers

to spend far more time and energy on the core projects that add the

most value to Move.”

New Relic also benefits Move by bridging the gap that typically exists

between development and operations. “Unlike many monitoring

tools, New Relic gives us operational data that actually makes sense

to people in operations,” said Steel. “That enables us to maintain a

two-way flow of information between the two groups. By creating

better relationships between development and operations, we can

create a better product.”

“New Relic gives Move operational data that actually makes sense to people in operations and enables us to maintain a two-way flow of information between groups. By creating better relationships be-tween development and operations, we can create a better product.”

Nick SteelSenior Manager of Systems EngineeringMove, Inc.

© Copyright 2014, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.04

Move, Inc. Achieves Continuous Deployment in QA Environment with Help from New Relic

About New Relic

New Relic is a software analytics company that makes sense of billions

of metrics about millions of applications in real time. Our comprehen-

sive SaaS- based solution provides one powerful interface for web and

native mobile applications and consolidates the performance moni-

toring data for any chosen technology in your environment. When your

brand and customer experience depend on the performance of

modern software, New Relic provides insight into your overall perform-

ance. Learn more at newrelic.com.

About Move, Inc.

Move, Inc. (NASDAQ: MOVE), a leading provider of online real estate

services, operates realtor.com®, which connects people to the essential,

accurate information needed to identify their perfect home and to

the REALTORS® whose expertise guides consumers through buying

and selling. As the o!cial website for the National Association of

REALTORS®, Realtor.com® empowers consumers to make smart home

buying, selling and renting decisions by leveraging its direct, real-

time connections with more than 800 multiple listing services (MLS)

via all types of computers, tablets and smart phones. Realtor.com®

is where home happens. Move's network of websites provides consu-

mers a wealth of innovative tools and accurate information including

Doorsteps®, HomeInsightSM, SocialBiosSM, Moving.com™, Senior-

HousingNetSM, homefairSM and Relocation.com. Move supports

real estate agents and brokerages by providing many services to grow

their businesses, including ListHub™, the nation's leading listing

syndicator and centralized intelligence platform for the real estate

industry; TigerLead®; Top Producer® Systems; and FiveStreetSM; as

well as many free services. Move is based in the heart of the Silicon

Valley — San Jose, CA.

REALTOR® and REALTOR.COM® are trademarks of the National Association of REALTORS® and are used with its permission. Move, Move.com, Moving.com, Top Producer®, TigerLead®, ListHub™, Doorsteps® and SeniorHousingNet™ are trademarks of Move, Inc. These and all other trademarks used in this work are the property of their respective owners.