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Coveo is the leading provider of Intelligent Search and Predictive Analytics, with more than 300 employees.
Their product helps teams offer better customer support, customer self-service, and knowledge management. Major companies like Adobe, Logitech and GoPro rely on Coveo to answer their customer enquiries, facilitate self-service, accelerate innovation and sell more (and better). Coveo use Hosted Graphite to monitor their entire platform so they can reliably, and consistently, deliver vital AI-powered information to their customers.
The technical problem
Coveo have been going through a period of rapid growth.
As a result, their Cloud-Ops team has doubled its headcount in the past three years to develop, deploy and manage the Cloud Platform which consists of over 1,000 servers. As the company expanded, it became obvious that they needed a monitoring tool that would scale with them. Cloud-Ops Team Lead Maxime Audet saw the opportunity to both outsource and upgrade Coveo’s monitoring to a tool that could collect, store and visually represent all their Ops and Business metrics: “the most important thing we needed was a tool that could reliably scale with us as the company got bigger.” Other requirements included:
- Amazon Web Services compatibility: To deliver its services, Coveo runs within an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. The team were looking for a tool that could offer visibility and trending into their main AWS resources including, but not limited to, EC2, ELB, and RDS.
- Reliable alerting: The team needed an alerting tool to let them know should something unexpected happen to their metrics.
- Team access and control: as a large and growing company, Coveo needed a way to share monitoring metrics easily and securely across teams.
The solution
Coveo began using Hosted Graphite five years ago and have been constantly adding more and more servers to monitor ever since.
As we grew, Hosted Graphite’s platform grew alongside us, providing more and more features over time.
As Maxime puts it: “We now have over ten times the amount of metrics we started with, and on different accounts. One of the great things about Hosted Graphite is that scaling to support this increase has been hassle-free, requiring no additional work on our side.”
Maxime was pleased to see this ease of use translate to other areas of the product: “what we like is the simplicity. Hosted Graphite takes care of scaling and upgrades for us so we can save time and concentrate on other important things. We really like the flexibility of dashboards and the simplicity of the StatsD daemon.”
Now responsible for monitoring the entire Cloud Platforms, Maxime and the team use Hosted Graphite to get visibility and trending on their main AWS resources (EC2, ELB, RDS, Costs, and others) in addition to other infrastructure and application metrics.
Ongoing feature improvements have been an unexpected bonus for Maxime and his team, “Over the years, they added lots of features that we didn’t know we needed before we used them, things like advanced alerts and automatic metrics expiration.” And when the team ran into any issues, Hosted Graphite’s technical support were on hand. For Maxime: “Working with Hosted Graphite’s support has been a pleasure. They are technically knowledgeable and fun to work with. I’m always impressed by how quickly they respond.” The team have also been reassured by Hosted Graphite’s status updates and transparency: as Maxime puts it: “They provide great uptime and are transparent and quick to notify us when there have been any issues.”
The result
Hosted Graphite helps us to identify potential sources of issues before they actually happen.
Now that they have Hosted Graphite’s advanced alerts set up, the team can identify and resolve potential issues quickly, often before their customers have had the chance to encounter them: “We set up different alerts for different metrics which gives us a deeper understanding of what’s happening with our monitoring. So if something goes wrong, we fix the issue quickly. The great thing is, it also helps us to identify potential sources of issues before they actually happen.” Now, with team sharing and access control, lots of people in the company both inside and outside of the development team use and rely on Hosted Graphite every day: “More and more people outside of our team use premade dashboards to get key platform statistics.”
For Maxime and the Cloud-Ops Team, Hosted Graphite has been a real time-saver: “not having to maintain and worry about our metrics infrastructure saves us valuable engineer time which can be put to much better use elsewhere.”
