Marks & Spencer reduces MTTR by one-third and ends 2 a.m. incident rooms with New Relic
After shifting to digital-first retail in 2018, Marks & Spencer deployed New Relic to gain end-to-end observability, reducing MTTR by one-third, cutting incident team sizes from 80 people to a targeted notification, and achieving full service visibility across thousands of digital touchpoints.
Background
M&S's digital transformation introduced hundreds of microservices and multicloud deployments that classical monitoring could not track holistically. Incident response was slow, expensive, and team-intensive.
What Was Implemented
- Deployed New Relic observability across multicloud and microservices environments (Azure, AWS, Kubernetes)
- Unified logs, events, metrics, and traces into a single observability layer
- Built refined dashboards incorporating context, analysis, and business-level aggregation
- Applied AIOps capabilities to reduce false positives and contextualize anomalies
Results
M&S reduced MTTR by approximately one-third (confirmed). Before New Relic, incidents involved up to 80 people; after, the platform pinpoints the issue and notifies only the responsible team, enabling resolution in minutes. The 80% incident-detection-time improvement cited in the book was not found in the New Relic source article.
Lessons
- Unifying observability data into a single platform is a prerequisite for reducing incident team size from "everyone" to "the right team"
- Omnichannel retailers face unique observability challenges because customer journeys span mobile, web, and in-store systems simultaneously
- Moving from averages and percentiles to context-aware anomaly detection gives engineering teams the precision needed to protect high-value customer cohorts