Case Study: Australia Post achieves rapid scaling to manage pandemic-driven parcel surge with New Relic Observability

Australia Post Uses New Relic Observability to Manage Pandemic Challenges

Australia Post, Australia’s national postal service, faced an unprecedented surge in online activity during the COVID‑19 lockdown in early 2020. With remote work, a spike in e‑commerce, annual PO box renewals and a new program allowing pharmacies to mail prescriptions, parcel tracking and authentication requests exploded—April saw 340 million transactions (more than double April 2019) and tracking/registration volumes several times higher than earlier in the year—putting severe strain on backend systems and teams.

Using New Relic observability (APM, infrastructure, browser and mobile), the team ran canary rollouts and gained transaction‑level visibility to pinpoint bottlenecks in the Small Business Portal, fix errors and scale systems. They implemented horizontal scaling and a frontend authentication cache that cut backend auth traffic by ~80%, reduced server requirements, preserved customer experience during the peak, improved SRE efficiency and positioned Australia Post to better handle future demand.

Australia Post

Andrew Nette

Head of Platform Engineering