Case Study: ELMS LN achieves reliable, scalable online learning during peak testing with New Relic

Penn State Keeps an Innovative Online Learning Environment on Track with New Relic

The Pennsylvania State University, a large public university with 24 campuses and about 96,000 students, runs the ELMS open‑source online learning platform (built on Drupal) to support growing online course demand. When an ELMS application repeatedly crashed—especially during high‑volume student testing—error logs only pointed to minor issues, so the instructional technology team needed a way to quickly find the true root cause without relying on system administrator expertise.

Using New Relic Servers and APM, the team traced transactions across systems and identified a faulty analytics application that generated excessive calls during test days and caused server crashes. Fixes not only stabilized the ELMS app but also uncovered and resolved other misdiagnosed Drupal performance problems; New Relic’s server‑level insights let developers optimize code, plan capacity for growth, and keep the online learning environment scalable and reliable.

ELMS LN

Bryan Ollendyke

Instructional Technology Specialist