Case Study: The Weather Channel achieves 24/7 real-time site performance visibility and reliable scaling with AppNeta TraceView

The Weather Channel Monitors Site Temperature with TraceView’s Heatmap 24/7

The Weather Channel, which serves hundreds of millions of users per day via weather.com, faced a major infrastructure challenge: a decade-old framework and monthly release cycle that caused scaling pains and poor visibility for operations. During extreme events—like Hurricane Sandy, when daily pageviews neared 400 million and required 144 servers—the team relied on manual, categorical rules to spin up capacity and needed better monitoring to support an automated, cloud-based architecture without degrading user experience.

As part of its Reboot Project the company moved to a Drupal/Acquia backend with an Angular.js and Varnish frontend and began using TraceView’s Heatmap for continuous monitoring. The new client-side architecture and 18-server deployment handled traffic spikes (e.g., 40→80 million pageviews) with no manual intervention; TraceView provides 24/7 visibility to surface latency spikes, 404s and outliers so one person can diagnose and resolve issues in minutes, enabling ongoing performance improvements and eliminating routine VM scaling.

The Weather Channel

Jeannie Enlow

Director of Content Management Tools