Executive Summary
A UK online prize competition platform processing millions of ticket entries across daily and weekly draws had outgrown its observability. Traffic was growing, but the team could not see inside the application layer, server logs were scattered, and there was no efficient way to search across log sources when something went wrong. Logicata implemented New Relic APM (procured via AWS Marketplace for integrated billing) and centralised all server, WAF, and ALB logs into Amazon CloudWatch with structured 30-day retention and shared Logs Insights queries. Cost: about $50 per month for around 89 GB of logs.
Customer Overview
Sector: E-commerce / Online Gaming
Location: United Kingdom
The customer operates a high-traffic online prize competition platform in the UK, processing millions of ticket entries across daily and weekly draws. The platform runs on AWS with Auto Scaling Groups behind a Web Application Firewall and Application Load Balancer. Rapid growth had outpaced the team’s ability to see what the platform was actually doing.
The Challenge
Growth without observability is firefighting by candlelight:
- No application performance monitoring. Bottlenecks, slow transactions, and error patterns in the application layer were invisible.
- Fragmented logging. Server logs, WAF logs, and ALB logs were either not captured at all or stored inconsistently across different locations.
- No structured retention. Logs that did exist had no defined lifecycle, making compliance and forensic analysis difficult.
- No query capability. When an issue happened, there was no efficient way to search across log sources to find the root cause.
- Growing traffic kept amplifying the cost of every blind spot. Reactive firefighting was getting more expensive each month.
The Solution
Logicata delivered two integrated observability improvements.
New Relic APM integration
- Procured New Relic through AWS Marketplace for integrated billing and no separate vendor relationship to manage
- Integrated the New Relic agent into the application build process, baked into the AMI and deployment pipeline so every instance is instrumented at boot
- Full platform user licence for the team with the 100 GB free data ingest tier
Centralised logging in Amazon CloudWatch
- Server logs captured from Auto Scaling Group instances and sent to Amazon CloudWatch Logs via the CloudWatch Logs Agent
- WAF logs migrated into CloudWatch Logs for centralised access
- ALB access logs migrated into CloudWatch Logs
- 30-day retention configured consistently across all log groups for cost-effective compliance
- CloudWatch Logs Insights queries documented and shared with the team for common diagnostic scenarios, so investigations start from worked examples rather than a blank prompt
Why CloudWatch plus New Relic rather than one tool
Application-layer transaction tracing and log analytics are different problems. New Relic does APM well. CloudWatch Logs does aggregation and retention well, and integrates natively with WAF and ALB. Running them together gives the team the right tool for each question without paying enterprise log-ingest pricing for what is fundamentally infrastructure plumbing.
Results
- 3 log sources centralised (server, WAF, ALB)
- Around 89 GB per month of logs flowing into CloudWatch
- Around $50 per month ($590 per year) total logging cost
- 30-day retention consistent across all sources
- Full application transaction tracing via New Relic APM
- Shared diagnostic queries in CloudWatch Logs Insights, so future investigations start fast
AWS Services Used
- Amazon CloudWatch Logs
- Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights
- AWS Marketplace
- AWS WAF
- Elastic Load Balancing (ALB)
- Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling
About Logicata
Logicata is an AWS Advanced Partner holding the AWS Cloud Operations Management Competency, validated through an independent third-party audit. Logicata helps organisations build and operate secure, well-governed cloud platforms on AWS, enabling customers to reduce operational risk, meet assurance expectations, and scale with confidence.
