Table of Contents
Customer Profile
Slickdeals is a community-based website and app that helps shoppers find deals, coupons, and discounts. The Slickdeals team was capable of building a self-hosted monitoring solution. However, in order to ramp up and focus on other areas of their AWS migration they opted for Hosted Graphite which met all their requirements and more especially for its unbelievable support.
“[MetricFire] fit the parameters of what we were looking for much nicer than … data dog, which was a much bigger monitoring platform that we were not prepared for financially or time-based to support.”
The technical problem
The Slickdeals team did just fine monitoring their AWS environment and application using StatsD. But as the business grew, monitoring became a daunting task. They decided to offload monitoring to a hosted solution because they spent too much time monitoring when time was better spent improving their business. Plus, they began to run into complications with storing and querying more extensive data. The Slickdeals team had spent about four weeks trying to get their environment to cooperate with in-house Graphite, Grafana, and StatsD. However, as Brian Feaver, Staff Software Engineer, mentioned, their team had “spent enough time trying to get it [their monitoring solution] working the way they wanted it to.”
Monitoring wasn’t the only project the team had going on, and with circumstances such as personnel changes, building a completely in-house solution for their environment was costing far too much time.
“...We chose hosted graphite because other solutions were either more … expensive or more complex than we needed.”
The solution
They chose Hosted Graphite because it was the best solution for their team. While researching monitoring options, Hosted Graphite came to mind because Brian had used it before. Plus, they were aware of Hosted Graphite’s ability to scale and efficiently store and query large sets of data.
They wanted the best fit and price for their use case, and Hosted Graphite was the right choice. Too often, hosted monitoring by other companies costs way too much because they offer lots of bells and whistles that are not always required. While having those extras can be nice, they can also be unnecessary, especially for teams trying to accomplish one simple thing the most
cost-effective way possible.
The result
Since signing up for MetricFire, the Slickdeals team have enjoyed the latest version of Hosted Grafana, Hosted Graphite, and Hosted StatsD. Slickdeals now has a simple solution that can support their use case without unnecessary (and expensive) integrations that other monitoring platforms combine in their plans.
They were able to run a load test, confirm that Hosted Graphite could ingest their data seamlessly, and build out alerts, and dashboards, and more with real data before choosing a plan, so they knew that MetricFire was the right choice before they became customers!
“ [MetricFire] …fit exactly what we were looking for.”
Conclusion
Using a hosted solution allows the Slickdeals team to focus on other projects that improve their business rather than only ensuring their infrastructure and applications are running smoothly.
You don’t have to focus your resources on monitoring. We can help you, so your team can work on more important projects!
If you think that MetricFire may be the right monitoring solution for your business, sign up for a trial! We can offer you excellent support from trial to load test, and onward!
