How Regeneron Built "WatchtowR" for Reliable Scientific Computing Observability, From Biomarker Exploration to Clinical Reporting

Summary

Regeneron's data science and engineering teams support hundreds of scientists across the clinical trial lifecycle through seven separate Posit environments on AWS. To centrally monitor license utilization, infrastructure costs, and application adoption, Siddhesh Salunke's Scientific Computation team, which manages Regeneron's Posit and HPC ecosystems, built a custom Shiny application on Posit Connect. This "WatchtowR" Shiny app pulls live metrics from Posit APIs and AWS into a single interactive command center, cutting a 22-hour manual license audit process down to seconds. Nick Giangreco, part of the Research Business Group's Precision Medicine team, came on as an early adopter and helped shape the project's direction from the start. This collaboration resulted in a shared source of truth that helps engineering and IT leaders make confident infrastructure decisions while giving scientists visibility into the reach and impact of the apps, analyses, and data products they put into the hands of clinical and research teams.

About:

Regeneron is a leading biotechnology company that invents, develops and commercializes life-transforming medicines for people with serious diseases.

Industry:

Life Science

Technology used:

Posit Team

"Posit Team has become a foundational platform for building, sharing, and scaling scientific data products across our portfolio. By expanding observability into how those products are used, we can better understand their reach, demonstrate their impact, and make smarter decisions about where to focus next."

Nick Giangreco

Principal Computational Scientist, Precision Medicine at Regeneron

The challenge

A Visibility Gap at Scale

In drug development, a single well-built analysis or app can quickly become critical: a Shiny dashboard that helps a biomarker scientist explore lab results in studies, or a reproducible clinical reporting workflow that a study team reviews for scientific discussion. However, as data products spread across an organization, teams can't easily tell what's being used, by whom, and how often.

Regeneron's data science teams support hundreds of analyses across the clinical trial lifecycle, and keeping that infrastructure running well means engineering leaders need clear, reliable visibility into how it's being used. Data on license utilization, budget consumption, and application adoption were scattered across seven different AWS environments serving teams from Research to Manufacturing, and pulling even basic operational metrics required enormous manual effort.

A single license audit took 22 or more hours of deduplication and business unit mapping. Deployment insights required five or more hours per request. Change management scaled linearly with volume, an hour of manual validation per change.

A Manager of Global Development put it plainly: they needed "clear visibility into CPU, memory, and license utilization to forecast capacity and plan onboarding without risking performance or cost overruns." Without a centralized view, leaders were making infrastructure decisions on incomplete data snapshots rather than anything close to a real-time picture.

The solution

A Single Source of Truth Built in Shiny

Regeneron needed more than a report. As the Director of Global Development put it, they needed "a complete view of deployment and usage trends to assess platform adoption and ensure the environment supports ongoing scientific work." That kind of visibility, across seven environments and multiple business units, couldn't come from a spreadsheet. So they built WatchtowR: a centralized Shiny application deployed to Posit Connect, designed around the needs of internal stakeholders.

WatchtowR delivers a centralized view across four areas:

License utilization: A clear map of how Posit licenses are being consumed across the organization, with duplicates removed.
Physical consumption: CPU and memory breakdowns across all seven AWS-hosted Posit deployments.
Deployment health: Real-time telemetry into environment status and performance, moving the team from reactive troubleshooting to proactive management.
IDE usage patterns: Adoption tracking across Jupyter, Positron, VS Code, and RStudio to guide internal training and enablement.

The true value of WatchtowR lies in its interactivity. Unlike a static PDF report that gets emailed out once a month and is outdated the moment it hits an inbox, WatchtowR is a real-time tool deployed to Posit Connect that empowers leaders and system owners to explore data on their own terms, drilling into specific regions, applications, or time periods to find answers in seconds.

"Having it all in one single place has made a real diﬀerence. WatchtowR gives our leaders the visibility they need to make decisions with confidence, and it lets our engineering teams prove their value every month."

Siddhesh Salunke

Tech Lead, HPC Engineering & Operations at Regeneron

The results

Driving Eﬃciency & Enabling Smarter Growth

Demonstrating Engineering Value to Leadership: WatchtowR gives engineering leaders exactly what they need to walk into a monthly review with confidence. Key metrics (user counts, adoption rates, deployment rates and utilization trends) are all available in one place, making it easy to show the tangible impact their teams are delivering.
Smarter Infrastructure Decisions: Previously, capturing CPU and memory utilization for a single period required an hour of manual eﬀort per request, delaying right-sizing decisions. Today, that visibility is instantaneous. System owners can spot application-level bottlenecks before they become problems, optimizing costs across AWS regions while ensuring teams have the resources they need.
Streamlined License Forecasting: For the teams responsible for budget management, WatchtowR has been a game-changer. The 22-hour ordeal of manual deduplication and business unit mapping for license renewals has been eliminated. Forecasting growth is now significantly more eﬃcient. No more piecing together data from disparate systems to understand where things stand.
Data-Driven Training Programs: With clear visibility into which IDEs are being “used” and “by whom”, Regeneron can now design more targeted training programs. Instead of guessing what teams need, they can let the data guide their enablement eﬀorts.

What's next?

Intelligence and Integration

The WatchtowR story is far from over. Regeneron has ambitious plans for the application's future, including:

Scaling Adoption: Expanding to executive leadership, embedding in-app documentation to lower the barrier for new users, and launching a self-serve API for other internal teams to consume WatchtowR metrics for their own custom workflows.
Conversational Insights: The team is exploring MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations to enable an AI-powered interface. Soon, leaders will be able to ask natural-language questions like, "Which region saw the highest growth in Positron usage last month?" directly within the app.
Deepening Insights: Enhancing real-time performance monitoring and capturing new data dimensions like role-based app publishing.
Open Collaboration: Regeneron is exploring ways to share elements of the WatchtowR architecture with the broader community via GitHub and AWS collaborations.
Scientific Application Repository (SAR): A unified repository compiling all applications, utilities, and APIs across business units that not only encourages but actively reinforces collaboration. This makes work more discoverable and reusable while reducing duplicated effort, compute consumption, and limited resources.