Fanzter scores spot on performance with New Relic
Company Size
11-200
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Coolspotters.com
- CoolPapers
- Streaks
- Summizer
- New Relic RPM
Tech Stack
- Ruby on Rails
- Amazon EC2
- Percona Server
- MongoDB
- Redis
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Revenue Growth
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Applicable Industries
- Retail
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Track & Trace of Assets
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Founded in 2007 and now headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, Fanzter is a private software company that creates some of the most popular websites and mobile apps centered around fan expression and content discovery. The small company has a big following with products like Coolspotters.com, CoolPapers, Streaks, and Summizer. Coolspotters.com, the company’s flagship product, connects pop culture and products. Its community of “spotters” creates a wiki-esque catalog of products and fashions used by today’s most popular celebrities. Users of the site can then buy the products they discover directly from the site. Coolspotters is a mashup of celebrity fashion and consumerism. Content from Coolspotters also flows into their popular iOS app, CoolPapers — an app for discovering fun and unique wallpapers for iPhones and iPads. Two additional iOS apps were introduced in 2010 — Streaks, a motivational calendar and goal tracker, and Summizer, a tool for searching and tracking topics and trends on Twitter.
The Challenge
Fanzter, a private software company, was under pressure to maintain high performance for its products, introduce new features, and increase application stability. The company's products, which include Coolspotters.com, CoolPapers, Streaks, and Summizer, served over 20 million users in 2011, serving more than 32 million page views each month. High performance for traditional and mobile access was essential to their success. In the early days of Coolspotters, the team analyzed Rails application logs daily to determine the areas with slowest performance. They also tried to correlate the slow query logs from the database with the actions that triggered them. These methods were time consuming and far from foolproof. Fanzter needed a better way to analyze performance, to find and fix performance problems.
The Solution
Fanzter turned to New Relic, a new startup specializing in production performance monitoring for Ruby on Rails. New Relic provided a simple Rails plug-in which allowed Fanzter to be up and running in short order. As New Relic evolved, they moved the installation process to a Ruby Gem package, allowing not only simple install, but making it very easy to keep the agent up to date. Fanzter uses the New Relic RPM to monitor and manage their Coolspotters application, which powers both the Coolspotters.com website and the API behind the CoolPapers iOS apps. The New Relic Ruby agent runs in more than 30 processes across the stack. Their applications (aggregating web and mobile) deliver more than 32 million page views to over 2 million unique users each month. The vast majority of this traffic is measured by New Relic RPM in at least one dimension. Powering mobile APIs is a big part of what Fanzter’s platform does and New Relic is a serious part of making sure that mobile performance is spot on.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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