Mattress Retailer Puts Log Management Issues to Bed with Humio: Modern Log Management Solution Improves DevOps Observability

This blog was originally published on humio.com. Humio is a CrowdStrike Company.

Saatva, the smarter luxury sleep brand, uses Humio to ingest and visualize streaming log data from a variety of sources, at scale. Humio improves DevOps observability, helping the retailer increase insights, optimize the performance and scalability of its web-based applications, and improve customer experience.

“I’ve never worked with an easier tool to integrate into our system. With Humio we can quickly create dashboards to identify errors across microservices, monitor throughput, visualize system latency—you name it.” — Daniel DeRossette, Sr. Engineer/Tech Lead – Order Management and Logistics, Saatva

Challenge: Increasing DevOps Visibility

Saatva’s mission is to make luxury mattress shopping easier for everyone by offering high-quality products, fair pricing, and superior customer service. As an online retailer, web application performance is fundamental to the company’s success. Poor online experiences can drive away shoppers, impair customer satisfaction, and impact the bottom line.

Saatva was using an open-source log management solution to gather insights into application throughput and latency issues, but the homegrown ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) stack was too difficult to use and maintain.

Solution: Humio Improves Observability

After investigating a number of options, including Datadog and Papertrail, Saatva selected Humio as its next-generation log management solution. Humio is designed from the ground up to help any organization achieve the benefits of large-scale logging and analysis—quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. The solution provides live observability with sub-second latency, index-free search for unparalleled speed, and advanced data compression for ultimate economics.

Saatva uses Humio to ingest, aggregate, and analyze log data from a variety of platforms. The solution features customizable, sharable dashboards that make it easy for Saatva development teams to visualize data and investigate issues across systems. “I’ve never worked with an easier tool to integrate into our system,” explains DeRossette. “With Humio we can quickly create dashboards to identify errors across microservices, monitor throughput, visualize system latency—you name it.”

“ELK has a really steep learning curve. We were looking for something that would be very easy for developers and QA analysts to get the hang of.” — Daniel DeRossette, Sr. Engineer/Tech Lead – Order Management & Logistics, Saatva

Results: Rapid Time-to-Value and Data-Driven Decisions

Humio helps Saatva improve DevOps visibility and gain actionable insights into application performance, response time, and scalability issues. Developers, QA engineers, support teams, and technical analysts all use Humio to efficiently identity, pinpoint, and resolve application and system design issues, and to improve capacity planning and performance engineering. The solution reduces operations cost and complexity, helping Saatva streamline adoption and accelerate time-to-value.

“Humio is a great tool for observability,” says DeRossette. “We use it to visualize message flows and make data-driven decisions. For example, we have an event-driven microservice that runs on AWS and translates order data from our sales channel to our logistics tool. We created a Humio dashboard to visualize system timing sequences so we could fine-tune our design and eliminate latency and processing issues.”

Humio’s parser functionality lets Saatva easily deconstruct log data to identify system capacity constraints and performance bottlenecks. “We use Heroku as our cloud platform,” explains DeRossette. “With Humio we can split out Heroku database metrics from the application-level logs to hone in on DB issues. In no time at all I created ten or so widgets to visualize things like pending connections, table cache hit rates, read/write performance stats, load stats, and memory stats to find out exactly what is going on with our database.”

Going forward, Saatva plans to leverage Humio’s Instana integration to further extend DevOps observability and tune application performance. The Instana Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution provides key container and microservices health metrics, which can be used to enrich Humio log data. With the Humio-Instana integration, developers, QA engineers, and operations teams can launch Humio directly from the Instana dashboard to efficiently debug issues. Time-synched displays make it easy to correlate log records with APM stats to troubleshoot complex problems and improve system designs.

Humio transforms raw log data into meaningful and actionable information, helping Saatva eliminate application performance barriers and capacity constraints, and improve customer experience. The solution helps the leading online mattress retailer put log management issues to bed!

Additional Resources

  • Get more information on industry trends, Humio’s streaming log management platform, and how logging everything benefits organizations by reading a recent blog post, listening to a podcast, or watching a webinar on-demand.
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