Innotas

Challenges

When Colin Ebert joined Innotas as Operations Engineer, he faced the challenge of a rapidly growing customer base with limited team resources to monitor application performance and debug customer issues. With a growing number of Innotas’ applications being hosted across multiple Apache Tomcat servers, Colin began looking for a tool that would empower his small team to:

• Quickly debug issues while restricting access to production environments
• Monitor customer activity and address concerns in real-time
• Correlate log events with related databases

Without a proper log management and analytics service, debugging customer issues was often a painful process. To maintain limited access to production servers when issues arose, the Innotas ops team would pull two-days worth of log data files for the QA teams to sift through. It was clear that a central log management and analytics service with read-only access would alleviate the bottleneck and improve team productivity.

Solutions

After considering ELK and Papertrail, Innotas chose Logentries for AWS/Apache infrastructure monitoring and application debugging. With Logentries, Colin was able to aggregate log data from all of Innotas’ servers, including data like mail relay access through Amazon, into one centralized location.

Today, the entire Innotas team is empowered to do things like:

• Monitoring and debugging customer issues in real-time
• Tracking customer email volumes
• Analyzing and improving the performance of individual customer integrations

With developers and QA teams able to access log insights without having to access production environments, the team spends less time managing cumbersome processes and more time working on new product and service innovations. With real-time access to log data, Innotas service teams working with customers can conduct live look-ins and follow issues through the entire application stack, resulting in faster resolutions. “It’s incredibly powerful to enable our team to walk through a customer’s actions in real-time” explains Colin.

What’s next on Colin’s agenda? With the ability to analyze log data in real-time, the Innotas team looks forward to further improving their use of custom tags to proactively spot potential errors before they become issues.

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