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

Ocado Group is a British online grocery technology company that utilizes cutting-edge automation technology in its warehouses, including machine learning for demand forecasting and custom robots to pick items. The company's business model relies on large, dedicated warehouses with no physical stores, and it has made the Ocado Smart Platform available to other retailers worldwide. Ocado uses Micrometer as part of its metrics and monitoring system, Flux, which provides complex, business-oriented metrics such as order abandonment rate and calculates these metrics using Amazon Kinesis and CloudWatch. The company tracks three main metrics for its event stream processing system: rate, loss, and delay, created using Micrometer and sent to both Prometheus and New Relic. Micrometer offers advantages such as close association with the Spring framework, vendor-neutrality, and support for four main metric types, including counters, gauges, timers, and distribution summaries, which provide flexibility in terms of investigations and creating alerts.