INDUSTRYTransportation

LOCATIONEnschede, Overijssel, The Netherlands

EMPLOYEES51–200

USE CASEPlatform-wide monitoring of application and infrastructure performance for its inventory, reservation, and ticketing software, S3 Passenger

PRODUCTS USEDNew Relic APM, New Relic Infrastructure, New Relic Insights

WHY NEW RELICNew Relic supports Sqills’ goal of global expansion by providing end-to-end visibility into application and infrastructure performance before, during, and after migration to AWS cloud

HIGHLIGHTS• Eased migration to AWS cloud

by providing insight into application performance and infrastructure during transition

• Provided complete visibility into Sqills’ microservices environment for its S3 Passenger Booking and Reservation platform

• Accelerated issue identification and resolution

• Increased employee productivity and customer satisfaction by delivering insights that led to faster product innovation

Founded in 2002 in Enschede in the Netherlands, Sqills’ aim from the start was to fill a need in the public transportation industry by providing a com-plete SaaS booking and seat reservation software for rail and bus oper-ators. Sqills is now well on its way to becoming the worldwide product leader for public transportation sales, reservation, and distribution software.

At the heart of the company’s success and continued rapid growth is its sales and distribution platform, S3 Passenger. Sqills designed the platform to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve customer experience by replacing the bespoke proprietary systems that used to dominate the industry. At the same time, they also built S3 Passenger to take advan-tage of a SaaS delivery model and the scalability and agility of the cloud. Recently, this meant migrating S3 Passenger from a local cloud provider to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to meet the company’s goal of global expan-sion. This journey to AWS was supported by New Relic, which Sqills has relied on for years to monitor its all-important application performance.

Guaranteeing performance for a mission-critical applicationToday, Sqills has an international footprint, and a customer base that includes such transportation giants as the high-speed railroad operator, Eurostar; the European bus service, BlaBlabus; the national rail transporta-tion operator of Ireland, Irish Rail; the French high-speed railroad operator, Ouigo; and the UK public transportation rail industry membership body, Rail Delivery Group.

Sqills’ S3 Passenger platform handles vast amounts of transactions each day (as commuters buy train and bus tickets), so the company must ensure optimal performance of its platform at all times.

‘Our platform is mission-critical for the companies that utilise it’, says Joost Doevelaar, Communications Officer for Sqills. ‘Any level of unavailability

Sqills Uses AWS and New Relic to Achieve Rapid Growth and Stellar Performance

Customer Case Study

or performance degradation means that no tickets are being sold. That situation is simply unthinkable’.

Patrick Wolbert, Operations Manager at Sqills, agrees: ‘Because booking a reserva-tion is such a time-sensitive matter, people are not going to complete the transaction if they have to wait too long for the system to respond. That’s why we need to make sure we’re doing everything possible to optimise the purchase process’.

This was hard to achieve without a system- wide performance monitoring solution. ‘It was challenging to pinpoint the root of any arising performance issues based on the information we were getting from the CPU,

the memory usage, or hard disk usage alone’, Wolbert says. ‘We needed a way to make performance more transparent, and we found it in the New Relic monitoring platform’.

Round-the-clock visibility for always-on performanceToday, the entire Sqills organisation uses New Relic to gain round-the-clock, system-wide visibility into application and infrastructure perfor-mance. Employing a DevOps model in which developers are responsible for the performance and operation of the code they create, the Sqills development teams have set up New Relic monitoring for each microser-vice that makes up S3 Passenger. The advantages are clear.

‘For example, we’ve connected New Relic to Slack so that alarm triggers are communicated and can respond to a tool like PagerDuty’, Wolbert explains. That way, if something is happening, New Relic will send out an alarm to an on-duty engineer from our DevOps team who can respond to the problem. There’s even an escalation layer, consisting of me and another colleague. This means that if things go bad, we can communicate that information directly to management on the customer side’.

But it’s not just the development teams that rely on New Relic. Nearly every Sqills employee has a New Relic account, and New Relic Insight dash-boards are on display throughout their offices. That way everyone can get an at-a-glance glimpse of S3 Passenger’s performance at all times.

‘I am not a technical person’, says Doevelaar. ‘But New Relic makes appli-cation performance visible to me. It makes it easy to see what’s going on and how business is developing. And if somebody like me understands it, that means there are a whole lot of people who are far smarter than me already taking steps to correct any problem that I might see. That kind of

Sqills Uses AWS and New Relic to Achieve Rapid Growth and Stellar Performance

visibility ensures that as a company, we are constantly aware of what’s going on. It’s impossible to surprise us’.

52.5 million passengers segments… and growingDetermined to maintain its position as a worldwide market leader, Sqills began looking beyond its local cloud provider for a global cloud provider that could support its goals of global expansion.

‘If we want to service customers around the world, we need to be able to show that we have the global reach to do so and the technical expertise to constantly improve our product without disrupting the daily business of our customers’, Doevelaar says. ‘That’s why we began migrating from our Dutch cloud provider to AWS a little over a year ago’.

Wolbert concurs: ‘Although our cloud and data centre provider is well known in the Netherlands, this was simply not the case in other coun-tries. It makes a big difference for us to be able to say, “We host stuff at Amazon...” because everyone knows Amazon. Add in Amazon’s compliance with security standards like PCI DSS [Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard] certification, and the move was even more of a no-brainer’.

AWS migration made easyWith the migration to AWS nearly complete, the transition couldn’t have gone more smoothly. Already accustomed to using New Relic to monitor the performance of every S3 Passenger instance, the Sqills team simply took the platform along when it migrated to AWS.

‘Since we’re monitoring the performance of our product 24/7 with New Relic, we have several KPIs that we’re constantly measuring’, Wolbert says. ‘If we perform the migration itself, which takes approximately an hour per platform, and perfor-mance remains unchanged, we know that the migration has been a success. We’re constantly looking to see that API calls are responding within a certain amount of milliseconds—and New Relic conveys this information directly to the devel-opment teams responsible for that part of the product’.

Sqills also used New Relic to evaluate their code for provisioning infrastructure servers and config-uring server redundancy, all of which they rewrote for optimisation within their AWS environment.

If we want to service customers around the world, we need to show that we have the global reach to do so and the technical expertise to constantly improve our product without disrupting the daily business of our customers. That’s why we began migrating from our Dutch cloud provider to AWS a little over a year ago.

Joost DoevelaarCommunications Officer, Sqills

Sqills Uses AWS and New Relic to Achieve Rapid Growth and Stellar Performance

Reaping continual benefitsSqills immediately identified improvements to address in its application thanks to New Relic, but the company continues to reap benefits from the platform to this day.

‘New Relic provides a graphical overview of performance that’s acces-sible to everyone’, Wolbert says. ‘As a result, we saw a steep incline in the quality and performance of our application as soon as we started using New Relic, and we continue to use the platform to search out and address weak spots’.

The DevOps teams at Sqills roll out new versions of its software daily. They rely on New Relic every day to see the impact of those changes and spot problems long before they surface for customers. According to Wolbert, it’s this kind of New Relic-inspired awareness that links the entire company in its common mission: ‘Even though each DevOps team is working on its specific component, we all share the information that New Relic provides, which means that everyone has a sense of whether we’re moving in the right direction, and what to do if we aren’t’.

‘That leads to the biggest benefit of all: a faster time to market for product improvements and features’, says Wolbert. ‘The proactive monitoring provided by New Relic means that our developers are spending less time troubleshooting and more time delivering products—improving the quality of our platform far more quickly than they would be able to without New Relic’.

The proactive monitoring provided by New Relic means that our DevOps teams are spending less time trouble-shooting and more time on delivering software—improving the quality of our platform far quicker than they would be able to without New Relic.

Patrick WolbertOperations Manager, Sqills

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Sqills Uses AWS and New Relic to Achieve Rapid Growth and Stellar Performance