How Ocado uses New Relic with Micrometer to monitor a complex event stream processing environment

Ocado Group, a British online grocery technology company, utilizes advanced automation technologies, including machine learning for demand forecasting and custom robots in its warehouses, to manage its online grocery operations and partnerships with international retailers such as M&S, Morrisons, and Kroger. The company's monitoring architecture, known as Flux, leverages Micrometer for metrics collection and analysis, integrating with platforms like Prometheus and New Relic for comprehensive monitoring and alerting. This system facilitates the generation of complex, business-oriented metrics, such as order abandonment rates, by processing business events through Amazon Kinesis and storing results in AWS CloudWatch. Micrometer's vendor-neutral framework supports various metric types and provides flexibility through a dimensional data model, enabling detailed aggregation and alert creation. This approach allows Ocado to maintain high-performance monitoring without being locked into specific vendor solutions, offering a scalable and reliable metrics system for their automation-heavy operations.