CrossFit, Inc.

Challenges

Kyle Moschetto is part of the 10-person IT team at CrossFit, Inc. He is the Senior Network, Systems and Cloud Engineer, working closely with CrossFit’s CTO, seven developers and two systems administrators on staff. Kyle joined the CrossFit team in 2014 to help the company modernize its IT infrastructure and applications.

“We weren’t taking full advantage of the benefits that cloud services can provide and we wanted to change that,” said Kyle Moschetto about what he and his IT team faced when he joined in 2014.

And so the journey to the cloud began. In no time, Kyle and team were able to move from a disparate, non-standardized cloud server environment (where logs were hogging the servers) to a fully configurable infrastructure, almost completely run in Amazon VPC – “an intelligent, scalable cloud system,” as Kyle put it. As part of this transition, Kyle’s team realized the important role of accessing, aggregating and analyzing their log data, but at the time, it was “very painful to find what we were looking for in our logs.”

Prior to selecting Logentries, Kyle and team had been paying for a different cloud-based log management tool, but they were never able to actually install a successful version of it. Despite trying hard to set it up a number of times, the team found the tool really difficult to use and “get it to just connect and find what they were looking.” So they just didn’t use it.

Solutions

After hearing about Logentries, they started a free trial and within 15 minutes were up and running. They had found what they knew they needed, and in particular, were excited that “the Logentries Chef recipe was so easy to use right out of the box.” Additionally, Logentries’ capabilities for log group aggregation, “intuitive” UI, and automated tagging sealed the deal.

In less than a year, Kyle and his team were able to migrate most of the CrossFit, Inc. infrastructure and the applications running on it to a scalable VPC solution. The secret recipe for CrossFit’s IT success? A log management toolset featuring Chef, Logentries and New Relic. Chef is used to programmatically control the application environment and infrastructure while allowing them to deploy new solutions in seconds. New Relic is used for core application performance monitoring in the cloud. Logentries is used for monitoring core cloud infrastructure performance to enable the CrossFit IT team to seamlessly scale when and where the need arose – all in real-time.

Logentries’ ease-of-use and seamless integration with Chef, AWS and New Relic now allows the CrossFit IT team to continue to grow into their infrastructure. In addition, the team is saving weeks of time troubleshooting and tracking down system issues. For example, during a recent period of peak traffic, intermittent Apache errors were causing problems for registered users of their site. Kyle and his team leveraged Logentries log management and analytics to swiftly diagnose the issue (a caching misconfiguration), and in less than two hours, CrossFit’s user experience was back to optimal performance. Without a nimble log analytics service, it would have taken Kyle and team days to diagnose and fix the intermittent troublemaker across dozens of front-end web servers and multiple caching layers, which would have had huge impact on the business. “Logentries substantially shortcut the time to root cause analysis and target acquisition, which is pretty awesome,” shares Kyle.

Today, CrossFit, Inc. uses Logentries to aggregate and monitor CrossFit’s systems logs to troubleshoot and capture key systems information to pass along to their development team. They plan to implement Logentries’ anomaly and inactivity alerting in the coming months too.

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