While the pandemic stopped a lot of things – one thing it did not slow down was the demand for pizza delivery.
As Domino’s Pizza was one of the first to introduce zero contact delivery during the height of the pandemic, the organisation relied on the observability platform New Relic to efficiently launch the program.
Matthias Hansen, group chief technology officer (CTO) at Domino’s Pizza spoke at the New Relic Futurestack event in Sydney last week.
He told audiences, “I find that whenever you’re sailing closer to the wind in those situations, it’s great to have observability so you can see what happens to your production environment when you put in code that obviously is of high quality, but maybe he would have liked another day or another week to work on it.”
While historically New Relic was used by the Domino’s ops team, Hansen said the development team is now also using the software.
“[Observability] gives you a good way to see how the system is reacting to the code being introduced, the features which are being enabled and so it makes it easier to balance the level of investment for these experiments,” said Hansen.
“The other aspect is it’s preventative so that you see is my system clean, is it operating well, and you can see some behaviours maybe during some peak trades, State of Origin, everything works fine. All the pizzas get there on time. But you find one or two things in the logs you don’t like and then that gives you the opportunity to prioritise.”
Domino’s has the motto ‘every order counts’ to ensure that families are not left in the lurch, waiting for pizzas to arrive on a Friday night.
“Normally when I order pizza, it’s not because I have too much time on my hand and really want to experiment. It’s normally the kids are hungry, I’m hungry. We need food on the table. It needs to happen quickly,” said Hansen.
“Maybe the error rate looks really low statistically speaking, but it’s still a family or a human being at the other end who doesn’t get their food on time. And so that’s really where New Relic helps us to keep ourselves honest on that.”
