Case Study: University of South Australia achieves exceptional online learning experience during COVID-19 with New Relic

UniSA delivers exceptional online learning experience amid COVID-19

The University of South Australia (UniSA), a public research university with about 32,000 students, faced an unprecedented surge in online demand during COVID-19 as lectures, exams and student activity moved virtual. Their learning management system—originally sized for roughly 3,000 concurrent users—needed to support many more simultaneous users (including resource-heavy exam quizzes) and required better visibility to prevent outages and performance issues during critical exam periods.

UniSA deployed New Relic (APM, Infrastructure, Insights) to gain real-time observability, using deployment markers, alerts and PagerDuty integration to detect and remediate issues immediately. The team could quickly identify bottlenecks, roll back faulty deployments, scale resources proactively and drop problematic nodes—cutting hours of bug-fixing to near-instant responses, keeping the exam period stable and markedly improving the online student experience.

University of South Australia

Richard Lamb

Manager