Southern Cross Austereo Enhances Digital Strategy with New Relic for Improved User Experience
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Asia
- Pacific
Country
- Australia
Product
- LiSTNR
- New Relic
Tech Stack
- Kubernetes
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) is one of Australia’s leading media companies reaching more than 95% of the Australian population through its radio, television, and digital assets. Under the Triple M and Hit network brands, SCA owns 99 stations across FM, AM, and DAB+ radio. SCA provides national sales representation for 34 regional radio stations and broadcasts 93 free to air TV signals across regional Australia. It also operates LiSTNR, Australia’s free audio destination for consumers, housing radio, podcasts, music, and news. With a workforce of over 1700 employees, SCA is a large corporate entity that plays a significant role in the Australian media landscape. The company is committed to innovation and digital transformation, aiming to enhance its audience engagement and operational efficiency through advanced technological solutions.
The Challenge
Like many industries, Australia’s radio broadcasting sector is going increasingly digital. Faced with competition from subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music, radio broadcasters are looking for ways to innovate and increase audience share. As part of a digital-first initiative, SCA created a major new application, dubbed LiSTNR, for its audience. Developed by Australians for Australians, the app is designed to consolidate all of SCA’s music, radio & podcasts under one umbrella. SCA knew it needed an understanding of what its users were experiencing, but this was hampered by a lack of observability. Application visibility was lacking in root cause analysis, leaving engineers to manually troubleshoot, with tracing being more complicated when performing manual tasks. SCA had previously looked to open source tools for monitoring but these were becoming increasingly difficult to use.
The Solution
To overcome the lack of visibility, SCA thoroughly researched the market and looked at multiple providers. It finally identified New Relic as ideal for its needs. SCA found implementation very easy, especially with the support received from the New Relic team. While only managed as a side project due to different priorities in the business, everything was up and running within a month. SCA set up a standard dashboard in its network centre that shows the current status of all its applications. “It’s a simple display that shows whether an app is up or down, and isn’t overwhelming in terms of detail so the first level support team can quickly trigger an on-call,” Amit explains. Specific New Relic dashboards have also been set up, as have New Relic alerts for certificate expirations in case auto-refresh stops working. Future dashboards are also planned for the leadership team, in order to provide a clear view of the business impact of technology initiatives and to enable real-time decision-making at the executive level. New Relic alerts have also allowed peak periods to be managed much easier. “If we have additional users jumping on, auto-scalers are in place to automatically scale up the entire service. But if New Relic alerts show that particular machines are overwhelmed, the team can add servers to the entire Kubernetes setup, and that way prevent any outage during a peak,” he says.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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