About Comic Relief
For over 40 years, Comic Relief has been one of the UK’s most iconic charities, known for its flagship annual fundraising event: Red Nose Day. In partnership with the BBC, this live telethon reaches millions of viewers in a single night, inspiring people to donate to causes ranging from poverty and homelessness to mental health support, in the UK and around the world.
Corin Ashwell is the Principal Engineer at Comic Relief. He and his team are responsible for ensuring the online donation platform operates flawlessly during the crucial three-hour broadcast window. With donations flooding in via Comic Relief’s online platform, SMS and phone, reliability isn’t optional—it’s critical. A second of downtime would mean lost donations and opportunities to create impact.
“There’s no redo. This is a live show. We have to be ready for millions of simultaneous donations hitting our platform,” explains Ashwell.
The Technical Challenge
Comic Relief’s architecture is built primarily on AWS serverless technologies like Lambda and API Gateway, allowing the platform to scale from zero to millions of concurrent transactions, chosen specifically for its performance and efficiency during intense spikes in traffic.
Testing and observing these systems, especially under the once-a-year peak load, presents a unique challenge. Before Red Nose Day, the team conducts extensive “game days” in a mirrored non-production environment. They simulate different payment flows—Apple Pay, credit cards, and more—to identify bottlenecks and preempt failure points.
The team needed an observability solution that could provide real-time insights during these high-pressure tests and the actual event.
The Lumigo Solution
Comic Relief adopted Lumigo as a replacement for their previous observability tool. The team quickly discovered Lumigo’s advantages:
- Real-time tracing that can be deployed in minutes across microservices makes it easy to identify issues.
- The explore dashboard allows for digging into particular services, and the functions presented are easy to isolate without noise from the production environment.
- Powerful tagging helps the team track specific errors and their frequency.
- Slack integration routes intelligent AI alerts to the right channels, effectively segmenting communications based on service or environment—production alerts go to one channel, while specific service alerts go to others.
- Intuitive dashboards allow the team to visualize the entire user journey—from the first HTTP request as a user starts their donation journey, through various steps like submitting payments, verifying addresses, and collecting marketing information.
“Lumigo became our first point of troubleshooting. We were able to drill down to the exact step in the user flow where something had broken,” said Ashwell.
Lumigo Copilot: The Game-Changer
In late 2024, Lumigo released the beta of its AI-observability Copilot, and Comic Relief began leveraging the tool to streamline issue resolution, especially critical in the fast-paced weeks leading up to Red Nose Day. The impact was immediate and significant.
Previously, understanding a complex trace might have taken 15 to 30 minutes, with engineers meticulously working through layers of logs and traces. Now, with Copilot, the team sees answers materialize in seconds in Slack with context. This dramatic time compression has transformed how the team approaches troubleshooting entirely, allowing them to address more problems in less time during their critical preparation period.
The benefits extend beyond just speed. Less experienced developers on the team, who once had to wait for senior engineers to interpret complex issues, now receive clear, actionable explanations from Copilot.
Furthermore, Lumigo Copilot is helping to break barriers between technical and non-technical staff. Product managers who previously did not use the observability platform entirely, now regularly use Copilot through Slack to interpret issues. When an alert fires, these team members can now understand what’s happening without needing to translate the issue through an engineer.
“Copilot’s summaries are game-changing,” explains Ashwell. “They save time, prevent confusion, and help non-engineers understand what’s going on. The issues are summarized in plain language. We’re seeing more non-technical users interpreting and helping to resolve complex microservices issues with the help of Lumigo Copilot.”
Real-World Impact
In the weeks leading up to Red Nose Day, Lumigo Copilot proved valuable in resolving two distinct technical issues that otherwise might have taken longer to identify and fix.
Comic Relief’s donor email service, which sends confirmation messages after contributions, began showing intermittent failures in the non-production environment. Using the Slack integration, a user asked Copilot to analyze the failed requests. Copilot identified that the issue originated from a specific request ID in logs from several days earlier—not in the current timeframe the team was investigating.
“We were looking at the current period, but Copilot found the problem in logs from days before,” explains Ashwell. “This allowed us to implement a solution before the event when every minute of preparation time matters.”
The team encountered a second issue during the soft launch of their new raffle prize system, which allows donors to enter a prize draw while supporting charitable causes. Initial testing revealed transactions were being added in duplicate to the database, though the user experience appeared normal. “This had no effect on the accuracy of the Prize Platform”, added Ashwell, “the issue was with the reporting on the business side”.
“Copilot helped us quickly identify where and why the duplication was occurring,” noted Ashwell. “Without those specific pointers, finding the issue would have required more extensive investigation.”
In both cases, Copilot accelerated the troubleshooting process by providing clear, specific information about the source of problems. This efficiency allowed the team to maintain their preparation schedule for Red Nose Day while ensuring all systems functioned correctly.
Results & ROI
Comic Relief has seen significant benefits from using Lumigo and Lumigo Copilot:
- Zero downtime on the most important night of the year. The team maintains its perfect record of keeping the donation platform running smoothly during Red Nose Day.
- Massive time savings for engineering and product teams. What previously took up to 30 minutes to diagnose now takes seconds in 90% of cases.
- Accelerated onboarding and productivity for new developers. “Having Copilot summarize traces in language is incredibly helpful for less experienced team members who are still learning the codebase. It saves time and empowers them to problem solve independently as Copilot gives them answers and sends them on the right path.”
- A bridge between technical and non-technical teams. Product managers who previously couldn’t decipher traces now have a way to understand errors through Copilot’s clear explanations.
With Lumigo Copilot, Comic Relief can confidently scale, spot issues before they escalate, and empower both technical and non-technical teams to move faster and smarter. The result is not just smoother operations—it’s a more resilient, responsive platform that is helping to transform how the team operates on Red Nose Day, its busiest night of the year.
