Fastly’s high-level data availability, scalability and performance ensures New Relic delights customers around the world

It’s a simple concept: when customers send their data to New Relic, they need to use it. Fastly’s partnership with New Relic means that valuable data arrives without a glitch. We sat down to talk with Andrew Hartnett, Vice President of Engineering about how availability is the lifeblood of New Relic’s platform, and how Fastly makes it happen.

Tell us about New Relic.

New Relic is an observability platform. We give customers the ability to understand where their systems are at all times, and to make educated decisions based on  data, not opinion. I am responsible for the core data platform, where we ingest data from around the world and make it available through jQuery and other products in near real time.

Why was Fastly the best choice for New Relic?

We were looking for a partner that could scale with us. Ideally, that partner would be on the edge already. Could I build what we needed myself? Sure, I guess. But why would I do that? Fastly already does it, and they do it better. Fastly has high-level availability and performance and provides a service that is performant, scalable, and reliable. 

Availability, scalability, and performance are considered three important pillars for most organizations. Which do you prioritize most often?

I would say availability first. When customers are sending us their data, it’s for an important reason: they need to use it. And if it doesn't get to our systems, then things like alerting and their monitoring won't trigger or won't appear. Availability for us is huge.

In addition to availability, did you have any other reasons for choosing to migrate traffic into Fastly?

We were also looking at performance. We did a lot of intense testing when we were vetting Fastly. And we were blown away by the performance. 

Can you paint us a picture of what you're looking for, and how Fastly has been able to help?

Our customers are around the world, and Fastly happens to be around the world as well. Their points of presence (PoPs) are located in key areas where we ingest requests from our customers. 

From the first conversation, dealing with Fastly has been wonderful. We kicked it off with some pretty intense proof of concepts (POCs), asking the question: can Fastly match the performance and reliability that we need? Everyone at Fastly from sales to the architects has made our experience really amazing so far. 

When working with a vendor, what do you look for in having that close partnership? 

You hit the nail on the head: it's a partnership. When we started working with Fastly, we knew that we were going to be entrusting them with our very important data. And we feel like it's in good hands. To make it exceptional, it's all of it put together: the technical, the support, the financials. We have that with Fastly. 

As an example, when we were having some technical challenges, we partnered and came up with a solution. Fastly bent over backwards in order to make this happen. It's called BYOIP: bring your own IP. It’s key to what we're doing. 

What’s coming up next for New Relic?

Well, one of the reasons that we really like Fastly is Compute gives us some interesting opportunities to do more than we're doing now. Right now, we're using it for routing through-data to specific data centers and clouds around the world. But there are more projects in the works that Compute will enable.

What makes you proud of what you do at New Relic?

It's the growth. It's the technical challenges. It's the partnerships. It's the engineering organization that I lead, all kind of wrapped together. I look at it as an amazing opportunity. Every day I get up, and I ask myself, “Am I prepared? Am I happy with what I'm doing?” And the answer is yes.