Case Study: Watch Duty achieves real-time wildfire response at scale with New Relic

Watch Duty's real-time data model in wildfire emergencies

Watch Duty, a wildfire emergency information service, needed to support rapid user growth and heavy API traffic while keeping its data and alerts reliable during crisis periods. With more than 70% of traffic flowing through APIs and concurrent users growing 10X, the team needed better visibility into backend health, caching performance, and potential failures. New Relic helped Watch Duty monitor these changes in real time using observability and Fastly integrations.

New Relic enabled Watch Duty to increase caching to as much as 40% of traffic, instantly see the impact in dashboards, and set thresholds to catch issues as they happened. The team could quickly flatten request spikes, fix crashes before they repeated, and maintain confidence during high-demand fire seasons. As a result, Watch Duty could focus on serving communities while New Relic handled the observability needed to keep services running smoothly.

Watch Duty

Josh Frederick

Staff Engineer