Case Study: Watch Duty scaled 10X to support 1.5M+ concurrent users with New Relic
Key results
The challenge
Watch Duty is a nonprofit that provides real-time wildfire information to the public. During major fire events its traffic spikes dramatically and unpredictably, and a small engineering team needed to keep the service reliable under extreme load rather than building and maintaining a home-grown monitoring stack.
The solution
Watch Duty relied on New Relic as its observability platform from the start. CTO Dave Merritt chose a ready-made platform over building a home-made solution with an ELK stack and Kibana, letting a small team monitor throughput and response times and dig into issues before they affected users.
“New Relic is our place to find opportunities and also verify what we expect to see when we have a ton of users accessing our services.”
DMDave MerrittCTO, Watch Duty
The results, in context
Watch Duty scaled 10X over the previous year, supporting more than 1.5 million concurrent users during the February 2025 California fires and up to 3 million daily active users. With over 70% of its traffic served via APIs, the small team used New Relic to spot reductions in throughput and response times before they impacted users.