PicPay cuts incidents by 65% with New Relic alerts and telemetry data

As the largest payment app in Brazil, PicPay was born with the mission of making people's lives easier. Today, PicPay offers banking services, but it also goes much further. The application enables over 30 million active users to pay bills and purchases, access the financial marketplace with various products and services, shop at Picpay Store and transact cryptocurrencies. PicPay’s massive user base demonstrates the value it provides to its customers, but this same user base presents unique challenges for the company’s engineering teams. Faced with an average of thousands of alerts every week, the PicPay team must keep up with the pace and resolve the most important customer issues to maintain strong customer engagement. In order to take advantage of the rapidly growing interest in joining and using PicPay, the company needed a way to reduce alerts and make the most out of developer resources.

Challenge: Slow, cumbersome incident management

The developer and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams at PicPay spent a significant amount of time managing and responding to incidents. Each alert required a high cost of coordination and cognitive loads to review, causing many of the thousands of alerts to go unnoticed or ignored. The PicPay team lacked confidence in the quality of the alerts: Which alerts were the most important to follow up on? Which alerts indicated critical issues were occurring? Which alerts didn’t require a response at all?.

Without being able to separate the most important issues from the noise, the team struggled to streamline their alerts into incident management workflows. Due to the sheer number of alerts and the amount of time required to address each issue, managing alerts and incidents had an outsized impact on the company’s bottom line, developer resourcing, and the overall customer experience.

Solution: Comprehensive observability to tackle alert fatigue and reduce downtime

For the company to continue to scale with its millions of active users, PicPay needed to address the issues around its alerting and incident management. PicPay deployed New Relic alerting capabilities to set platform standards for alerts, resulting in a 65% reduction in incident volume. This led to dramatically improved efficiency, in alert and incident investigation. 

PicPay reduced its mean time to resolution (MTTR) by scaling and centralizing its logs onto New Relic. MTTR improved by 30%, with a 51% improvement in total downtime annually. In addition, the team created user growth dashboards for their C-Suite executives, making it easier for leadership to follow growth in real-time. 

Finally, New Relic provided a centralized platform to ingest telemetry data from multiple sources and simplify workflows for generating actionable alerts. New Relic allowed PicPay developers and SREs to immediately identify the root of any issue and understand who would be responsible for fixing the issue at hand. This allowed SREs and developers to spend less time uncovering hard-to-find incidents and more time to focus on innovation. 

Impact: Increased revenues, more frequent releases and improved customer experience

By cleaning up its alerts and reducing incident volume, PicPay was able to focus on bigger initiatives like developing new functionalities and staying current with new financial compliance requirements.

After deploying New Relic across its tech stack, PicPay saw a 10% increase in both new revenue generated from existing customers and revenue generated from new customers. The company also experienced a 10% improvement in its customer attrition rate and a 20% improvement in revenue leakage rate due to New Relic. Investing in New Relic has already delivered a 191% return on investment and has helped set up PicPay for even greater gains in its business life cycle.