Purplle taps New Relic to cut incident response times

Purplle has chosen New Relic as its observability partner to improve oversight of the beauty retailer's digital platform.

The Mumbai-based company is using New Relic's digital experience monitoring tools across its business to shorten the time needed to detect and fix technical incidents. It expects monitoring of key business metrics to reduce incident resolution times by 60% to 70%.

Founded in 2011, Purplle serves millions of monthly active users through its online business and a network of more than 150 physical stores. It sells beauty, skincare, hair care, electronics, and cosmetic products, including its own brands and third-party products.

Before the deployment, Purplle's engineering team often relied on feedback from business and product teams to spot platform problems. Unified dashboards now give developers and product managers direct visibility into issues, removing an escalation process that had slowed responses.

According to New Relic, the system has already helped Purplle identify and resolve problems within five minutes, with the goal of containing errors before they affect shoppers. That is particularly important in online retail, where outages during busy periods can lead to lost sales and pull engineering staff away from development work.

Operational changes

Purplle has standardised observability practices and is using observability as code and DevOps Research and Assessment metrics as part of a broader effort to change how its engineering teams work. The company expects these changes to reduce manual incident work by 20%, allowing engineers to spend more time on application modernisation and software releases.

It is also using application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and synthetics monitoring to prepare for heavy shopping periods such as Valentine's Day, Navratri, and Diwali. Real-user monitoring is being used to assess the lower end of the sales funnel and identify points where the online journey can be improved.

These measures are part of a plan to improve overall application performance by 10%. Purplle added that moving its full observability stack to one provider has closed visibility gaps that had made fault detection harder.

Cost control was also part of the decision. Purplle said New Relic's consumption-based pricing gives each business unit visibility into its own use of observability tools, allowing teams to monitor spending and make throttling decisions when needed.

The company reached a valuation of more than USD $1 billion in 2022, joining the ranks of India's unicorn start-ups. Its business model includes direct sales of owned and acquired brands, commission from third-party sellers, and paid memberships that offer benefits such as free shipping.

Purplle is also testing New Relic's artificial intelligence tools in staging through autonomous remediation workflows, though those systems are not yet part of the live production environment. The work is aimed at identifying and resolving issues in real time while drawing insights from large volumes of telemetry data.

"By solving issues in just minutes with the New Relic platform, our teams have shifted their focus from troubleshooting to enhancing the customer journey. This reliability is enabling us to create more conversions, proving that a seamless digital experience is the ultimate driver of customer satisfaction," said Vivek Parihar, Vice President of Engineering and Security at Purplle.

"Purplle's reputation as India's most trusted online destination for beauty and personal care products is one that can only be preserved through providing the best digital experiences," said Rob Newell, Senior Vice President and General Manager for APJ at New Relic.