OuiCar Unlocks Data Insights Faster with New Relic

OuiCar, a Paris-based car-sharing service, offers over 30,000 private cars across France to its more than two million users. The collaborative consumption service lets travelers book shared vehicles through an app, with insurance and 24-hour assistance included in the rental price. With so many users on the go, OuiCar needed a way to quickly identify and address customer issues with booking or service.

Since 2018, OuiCar has been using a variety of services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). OuiCar chose AWS because of its proven performance and reliability across various industries. The company consistently relies on data from AWS to monitor their system’s performance.

However, with so many services and so much data, it was time-consuming to make meaningful connections and find the root cause of application issues. OuiCar needed a solution that allowed it to visualize data from all its AWS services in one place to better discover insights and address problems faster.

OuiCar had tried other solutions in the past, but they didn’t provide a comprehensive view of its entire environment. “When I arrived at OuiCar they were using another monitoring solution, but it required a lot of work to see every request that goes through every microservice. We needed something that could handle it automatically. So, I thought about New Relic because I had used it in a previous company. The fact that it was easy to purchase through AWS Marketplace was also a plus for us,” said OuiCar’s chief technology officer, Guillaume Cavana.

“There were three main things that OuiCar valued in our platform. First, the New Relic platform is open. It can collect data from any source and extend that observability across the whole digital landscape. Second, it connected OuiCar’s data so they can find answers quickly and automatically highlight relationships. Finally, it's programmable. It gives OuiCar in particular, the ability to start with a creative experience and create their own apps, they're own dashboards, and even have a completely custom user interface,” explains Arnaud Becart, Senior Solutions Architect at OuiCar.

OuiCar purchased and deployed New Relic’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution from AWS Marketplace. New Relic’s observability platform helped OuiCar to instantly understand application, real user and infrastructure performance, dependencies, and bottlenecks. It integrated with every AWS managed service OuiCar was using and provided a 360-degree view of the data from a single dashboard. The New Relic platform compiles a comprehensive view of the health of servers and hosts, as well as dependencies like apps, services, and microservices.

By implementing New Relic’s solution, OuiCar now collects and analyzes data sets more efficiently, which allows the company to detect problems 20 percent faster. The teams no longer spend time sifting through logs or stitching together data from separate tools. "You don't waste your time searching anymore," said Cavana. "Before, it took one or two hours to find a performance issue, and now in New Relic, it's a matter of minutes."

This efficiency helps OuiCar monitor the ease of use and customer satisfaction of a recent feature update. Teams have visibility into critical incidents and can resolve them before customers are affected. This level of visibility has decreased backend response times by 40 percent.

One feature that allows for swift but deep analysis is New Relic's distributed tracing. With distributed tracing, developers can follow the path of a single request end-to-end through a complex system. Teams observe the entire chain through every service and dependency, from database to endpoint, and uncover which step in the path is creating a bottleneck or causing an error. "The APM can track traces, show exactly in the code where a problem is, and our developers can fix it,” says Cavana. ”We connect the infrastructure product from New Relic directly to AWS services and link data from our infrastructure model with the APM model. After we deploy, we can see if there is a problem and where the problem stems from – the infrastructure side or the application side." This contextual alignment enables all teams to streamline workflows and maintain a complete view of the dynamic development environment.

OuiCar uses New Relic to keep customers in the loop when problems arise. "We use the tool as an alerting system too,” says Cavana. “When a user experiences a performance issue or error on the platform, we receive an automatic alert from New Relic, and then we can send a message to the customer."

With this solution, OuiCar has a more complete depiction of the ecosystem, and it can use this data to make decisions confidently. Most importantly, the company no longer wastes hours combing through multiple tools and logs. Unified pattern recognition and machine learning capabilities sift through the data and empower teams to find answers. Without complex configuration or the need to stand up servers, teams can quickly detect anomalies, discover deficiencies, and improve on key business metrics.

Teams at OuiCar are now proactively managing application failures and resolving system issues. With the significant increase in visibility, developers find issues in minutes instead of hours. This makes the rollout of updates or new features much simpler for the company and its customers. Cavana states, “If a company’s main issue is a performance issue, you should go with New Relic, actually. Their APM solution is everything you need, and it was the first to be that efficient. And with procurement through AWS Marketplace, it took us half a day – in half a day, everything was installed and we were on our way.”