Millions of Americans rely on The Weather Company’s applications to be aware of changes in the weather, sometimes seeing a 50-75% increase in users looking for information. The DevOps team must be able to monitor its applications to ensure optimal user experience even during sudden spikes in application traffic.
The Weather Company is using Instana to focus on reducing downtime and keeping the highest quality user experience.
Universal and powerful, weather has a serious effect on people’s emotions and behaviors. From food and clothing choices to taking shelter after a tornado alert, millions of decisions are made every day based on the weather. Weather also serves a critical role in business intelligence, such as guiding the route a pilot takes to avoid turbulence, when a farmer fertilizes their crops or how an energy company mobilizes its crews after a power outage.
The Weather Company focuses using their knowledge, scale, technology and trust to advance the science of accurate weather forecasting and help people everywhere make better decisions.
The Challenge: During extreme weather, such as hurricane season, or winter storms, The Weather Company’s applications see a 50-75% increase in users looking for weather information.
“If there’s a large winter system that’s going across the country and closing schools and businesses, then people will come to us.” – Todd Eaton, Head of QA and DevOps for The Weather Company.
Relied on to provide valuable weather details, The Weather Company must be able to monitor its applications to ensure optimal user experience even during sudden spikes in application traffic. 
To observe and manage its applications, The Weather Company has a DevOps team and a QA team. The DevOps team is responsible for maintaining the systems for various applications, while the QA team performs testing on those applications. Previously, the team was using New Relic as a tool to support its application monitoring needs.
“When we set up New Relic, we had to configure some agents to get the telemetry that we wanted, and it became a little painful.” – Todd Eaton, Head of QA and DevOps for The Weather Company.
The Weather Company needed a solution to monitor its applications that worked more seamlessly with its DevOps and QA teams, without any configuration complexity.
The Solution: The Weather Company’s DevOps and QA teams got Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform up and running quickly and smoothly.
“With Instana, it pretty much came out-of-the-box. It’s not like we had to do anything special. We had the application side and infrastructure up within one sprint. We were able to visualize a lot of our systems right away.” – Todd Eaton, Head of QA and DevOps for The Weather Company.
The Weather Company found Instana’s platform incredibly easy to use, with data that could be dissected and displayed in different ways so that each DevOps or QA team member could make use of it.
“The visualization of where the traffic is, and what type of traffic it is has been beneficial for my QA group to determine if we have to beef up more testing in a different area, or if we have certain traffic that’s coming from a region in the world that we need to put more emphasis on.” – Todd Eaton, Head of QA and DevOps for The Weather Company.
The Results: After a seamless setup, The Weather Company is using Instana to focus on reducing downtime and keeping the highest quality user experience.
“When we have an error on the services layer, we can drill down into the lines of code and actually see where that error is coming from. That’s been invaluable. We’ve been able to use that and give it to development to say, ‘Hey, we have a problem we need to get resolved.’” – Todd Eaton, Head of QA and DevOps for The Weather Company.
Even when issues arise independently from The Weather Company’s own software infrastructure, Instana has been able to help. Akamai had a recent outage, after a DNS went down, which impacted a number of well-known brands. As an Akamai customer, The Weather Company was kept up to date on this outage with Instana’s alerting functionality. The DevOps team was able to monitor application usage and was prepared to act, should there have been a service disturbance.
Todd Eaton, The Weather Company’s Head of QA and DevOps sums up his organization’s decision to implement Instana.
“Instana is a nice, lightweight monitoring solution that you can stand up fairly quickly and get meaningful data. And that’s ideally what a tool is supposed to be for, right? We always strive for those tools that we can easily set up, get stuff back fairly quickly, that are useful and helpful in keeping our systems as finely tuned and performing as possible. I’d have to say my experience with Instana fits that bill. I would recommend it for others to try.”
