Motus

Challenges

Over the last few years, Motus experienced a surge in business driven by its transformation to a mobile hub for their customers. As the company expanded their existing client footprint, they seized an opportunity to also integrate mobile workforce data with CRM, sales and expense management offerings. With the new business requirements, Motus knew they had to move from their legacy PHP single stack to a more nimble, service-based architecture to meet the demands of rapid development.

As the new infrastructure development started, Motus’ VP of Engineering Scott Rankin realized that Motus’ existing log management and analytics solution, Splunk, was too difficult to manage and too costly to maintain within their environment. With a team of 11 developers, eight QA engineers and three operations professionals, Scott’s team was losing tens of hours per week analyzing logs across 20 servers at once. The cost of the product, the necessity of on-premise hosting, and the unwieldy interface led Scott to seek out alternative options; he knew they needed an agile, easy-to-use and scalable log management solution.

Splunk is good if you know how to use it, but you have to go to a three-week training class to get the most out of it. We did not want to commit to that level of power usage.

Solutions

Scott and his team set out to find a new log management and analytics service and decided to trial two free services, Logentries and Loggly.

The development team found the Logentries interface to be very intuitive and the service provided an easy solution for centralizing their logs, from across their servers. Logentries’ enhanced application troubleshooting capabilities were also valuable; for example, during a customer support call, the QA team was able to identify issues in real time, while the customer was still on the phone. Logentries’ alerting and tagging features enabled the development team to know immediately when something was going wrong – “even at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

Logentries’ log aggregation and analytics services sealed the deal for Scott. His team took advantage of the alerting and tagging features, immediately solving persistent networking issues. In one example, Motus tracked down issues with their hosting provider by using Logentries’ alerting capabilities, which allowed them to correlate app performance issues at the hosting level. The trend-charting capabilities of the Logentries platform were an added bonus – much more in-depth than simple up/down alerting; this capability enables the Motus dev team to reproduce and isolate issues, capture the activity and review the problem, further improving the reliability of their own service.