Relativity is an e-discovery software – a platform that helps document-heavy organizations like law firms, corporations, and government organizations, organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. With over 150,000 active users across 40+ countries, the team needs to make sure Relativity is running well and that they are providing the best experience to their customers.
To do this, they use Salesforce as their CRM, JIRA for project management, New Relic to monitor the platform, and PagerDuty for agile incident resolution. “We’re very focused on providing a great customer experience to our users. In order to do that, we need to have seamless ITOps,” explains Ryan Puzzello, the Atlassian Team Lead at Relativity.
“When our apps don’t talk to each other, it means one of our managers has to do a lot of manual reconciliation, which means he would have to spend evenings reconciling tickets from Salesforce to JIRA to PagerDuty. He had three systems of record which could take five hours of tedious work every month,” said Puzzello.
“Additionally, other parts of the process are manual – you have to have people constantly sending alerts. This can cause you to miss the big picture narrative because it relies on people instead of technology. Technology automatically keeps a record.”
Empowering Citizen Integrators Over Custom Code
Relativity’s journey began when they wanted to connect Salesforce, JIRA and PagerDuty. Puzzello found that the out-of-the-box functions were insufficient as the data moved back and forth, but not in any way that gave the staff control.
“Out of the box, we could only integrate the systems in a very basic way and lacked the ability to implement our own custom business rules,” said Puzzello. “Custom development is usually the next step, but we really wanted to empower our administrators. We wanted more clicks instead of code! Workato provided a scalable solution which offered a nice balance of customization with a relatively simple point and click solution for our administrators.”
Custom development also requires a more significant investment in time to develop and test a solution along with the on-going need for specialized support. “Custom development is long and would distract our dev team from their work. We were able to get up and running with in weeks on Workato,” said Puzzello.
Additionally, Workato has zero devops. “Workato allows our developers to stay focused as the technology works seamlessly in the background. We let Workato take care of security and infrastructure so our developers don’t have to do that work behind the scenes.”
How it Works: Relativity’s ITOps Workflow
Streamlining Customer Service Ticketing from Salesforce to JIRA
If customers want to contact Relativity, they send in tickets by phone or email which are tracked in Salesforce. Relativity wanted to connect Salesforce and JIRA so that, when the issue gets to JIRA complete with all the custom objects and relevant information, the staff can act on it much more quickly. “Our engineers can answer sooner, which means our support is better,” said Puzzello.
Using PagerDuty For Incident Management
Relativity also uses PagerDuty to alert the right team members if an urgent issue comes in. In the unlikely event that a customer submits an issue that requires urgent attention, the issue will go from Salesforce to JIRA and then Workato will send it to PagerDuty. PagerDuty will alert the correct team member of the issues so it can be resolved as quickly as possible.
Relativity has several Workato recipes that move issues from different project teams in JIRA into PagerDuty, creating a new incident in PagerDuty. Then Workato updates JIRA with the PagerDuty incident number and other information to keep the two programs in perfect sync.
From there, PagerDuty does the job of alerting the correct party if the issue escalates according to the parameters Relativity has set in PagerDuty.
The Workato recipes will also pick up any updates to the PagerDuty incident, for example if the incident is resolved or changed, and updates the corresponding issue in JIRA.
Proactive ITOps with NewRelic, JIRA, and PagerDuty
Every business should monitor their infrastructure and put a workflow in place to handle exceptions. This will always result in a better experiences for customers and can proactively prevent issues being filed by a customer by fixing the issue before it effects anyone.
Behind the scenes, Relativity uses Workato to help proactively monitor their systems to prevent any customer issues. They do this using New Relic, JIRA, and PagerDuty. “We wanted to build an ITOps workflow where the initial ticket goes to JIRA, all the performance information is tracked in New Relic, and ultimately, have it all go to PagerDuty if an incident occurs,” explains Dan Waidelich, communication specialist at Relativity.
New Relic is a common ITOps app that acts like a health tracker for your website or software, tracking how the infrastructure and the various apps you work with are performing based on performance KPIs. Puzzello created a Workato recipe that will trigger if New Relic detects something and automatically creates a new issue in JIRA.
From here the recipes described above will move the incident from JIRA to PagerDuty, setting off any alerts that need to be sent to keep Relativity’s infrastructure in perfect health. “Lifecycle is really key. We try to track as much as possible so we can understand what happened,” said Waidelich. “So we really need a workflow that we can refer to. Workato provides that.”
Peace of Mind and Full Customer Journey
Not only do these automations save hours of work, but they also provide a digital trail so Relativity can really see the full customer journey.
“We want to create an audit trail and a consistent story where we can see the lifecycle of an issue without reconciliation. Workato allows us to create a narrative of how we’re doing at Relativity,” explained Puzzello. “By enabling a process that’s driven by technology, our ITOps are seamless.”
“Our Engineering manager who had to reconcile those systems previously, got 5 hours back monthly. Not to mention, just the sheer amount of integrations we want to do would have been at least 10-15 hours of developers time that I can now do on Workato myself. Workato also gives us the ability to make as many modifications and iterations as we need to.”
Perhaps the biggest benefit of all is peace of mind for the entire organization. “The customer doesn’t see these systems in place, but they will ultimately get better service. There is this intangible peace of mind that all of these things are working,” said Waidelich. “We know that our apps are going to talk to each other and that the data is going to go where it needs to go thanks to Workato. That lets us take our customer support to the next level.”
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