Challenge
Gotransverse provides cloud-based software that lets its enterprise customers take advantage of usage-based pricing and monetization at massive scale, through a subscription-based business model.
Founded by globally recognized billing experts, the company offers an intelligent billing and subscription management platform that automates the subscription order-to-cash process, including billing, rating, collections, mediation, analytics, and revenue recognition. Like most technology leaders, Gotransverse depends on business agility to innovate quickly and develop new applications to meet changing market needs. “We have a microservices architecture that allows containers to work independently to support more rapid deployment,” said Brandon Metcalf, Director of SaaS Operations at Gotransverse.
Gotransverse is a global organization with offices in the U.S. and Ukraine. To support its operations, the company utilizes approximately 30 different containerized services, spanning thousands of cloud resources using Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
To manage the complexity of its container-based applications spanning multiple servers, the company utilizes Kubernetes orchestration software. However, Gotransverse lacked visibility into the health and performance of its environment. “We had very minimal monitoring across the board,” said Metcalf. “Our piecemeal Prometheus solution offered essentially zero visualization around the data. An alert would fire, but it could not provide graphs to see what led up to that threshold, or any context around the alert. That led to lots of gaps.”
LogicMonitor was the only solution that provided a complete feature set, including full reporting and alert capabilities, all in one solution.
Brandon Metcalf Director of SaaS Operations, Gotransverse
Solution
After considering options from several different vendors, Gotransverse chose a comprehensive infrastructure monitoring platform from LogicMonitor. With integrated Kubernetes monitoring, the solution lets the company monitor all its Kubernetes clusters and the containerized applications running within them, alongside its existing IT infrastructure—all from one pane of glass.
Competitive offerings such as Datadog and SignalFx lacked the comprehensive feature set and Active Discovery capabilities to keep monitoring continuously up to date with changes to the company’s environment. Data is automatically collected for Kubernetes nodes, pods, containers, services, deployments, and master components. “LogicMonitor was the only solution that provided a complete feature set, including full reporting and alert capabilities, all in one solution,” said Metcalf. “Having centralized collectors is great, because previously we lacked automation and did not have the ability to put an agent on every device that we wanted to monitor.”
Deployment of the solution was fast and easy, enabling Gotransverse to see the benefits of its solution right away. “Speed to deployment was a big factor, and I knew I could get up and running quickly with LogicMonitor,” said Metcalf. “Training has basically been an information-sharing process, with ad hoc meetings to answer questions. I can build dashboards, then our team can quickly start using them as examples.”
Benefits
With the LogicMonitor solution in place, Gotransverse has closed its monitoring gaps to gain full insight into its AWS environment and Kubernetes orchestrated, containerized applications. This allows the Gotransverse Ops team to be more efficient at determining the root cause of issues and remediating them, maximizing application and service performance, and proactively preventing downtime. “The LogicMonitor solution is saving us approximately 24 hours a week,” said Metcalf. “We are able to address problems before they impact users.”
In addition to delivering the visibility Gotransverse needs, it was critical that LogicMonitor integrate smoothly with the company’s existing technology ecosystem, including the HashiCorp suite of open-source infrastructure tools. “We utilize HashiCorp Vault and are actively testing Vault monitoring with LogicMonitor,” said Metcalf. “We are using data from HashiCorp Consul cluster monitoring and metrics.”
With LogicMonitor’s extensive integration library and comprehensive Kubernetes monitoring capabilities, Gotransverse can take full advantage of automated, deep visibility into its containerized applications and its complete AWS environment.
“We really use LogicMonitor as a source of truth that functions like a configuration management database (CMDB),” said Metcalf. “For example, I have a project that I want to get done where all of our services report version information across infrastructures, so we can easily see what we’re running everywhere. I tell colleagues that they can find pretty much every piece of information they need in LogicMonitor, so they don’t need to login to AWS.”