Case Study: Zendesk achieves real-time performance visibility and faster issue resolution with New Relic

Zendesk reaches higher plane with help from New Relic and Rackspace

Zendesk, a cloud-based help desk used by over 15,000 customers and some 65 million end users worldwide, needed to deliver an intuitive experience and rock‑solid performance across a complex Ruby on Rails, multi-tenant, sharded architecture. With agile teams in California and Denmark rapidly rolling out features and a published SLA of 99.9% uptime, the company faced the challenge of ensuring consistent availability and quickly identifying performance issues at peak loads (≈60,000 requests/min and 500K queries/min).

Zendesk implemented New Relic for real‑time application performance monitoring and moved its hosting to Rackspace with Fusion‑io SSDs. New Relic provided immediate, drill‑down visibility to pinpoint and resolve bottlenecks, while Rackspace improved I/O and scalability; together they delivered near‑100% uptime, faster troubleshooting, and freed the team to focus on product innovation.

Zendesk

Zack Urlocker

COO