Who is the Client

A US-based Fortune 500 departmental store chain with more than 1000 stores across the states, they are bringing stylish clothing for the entire family since decades now.

The Challenge

The client runs a huge e-commerce portal that receives a lot of data that needs to be analyzed to make sound business decisions. That’s why, the client migrated the previous Oracle Commerce Server (ATG)-based portal to an open-source platform (Mosaic), which was hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

With this change in the e-commerce platform, there was an immediate need to monitor application components' health running on the cloud-based microservices architecture. Upon introduction of the microservices architecture, this need was more urgent now than with the earlier platform since the client has thousands of servers with an even larger number of services running on them. Identifying any service which was ‘down’ on which server became a significant challenge for the client.

The Solution

The client asked GSPANN to design, develop, and execute a 24x7 production support program for DevOps of the new microservices-based e-commerce platform. This effort included analyzing their existing approach, identifying opportunities to address gaps with updated processes, technologies, governance models, and implementing the solution. Also, we executed the new production support program for the client.

GSPANN led the effort to develop both – the production support program and the technology solutions. We developed a tool to monitor applications proactively and rectify problems at run-time. The tool also provides visibility into the health of all services within a single dashboard. We also developed additional tools to sanity check deployments and automatically address any identified issues.

Business Impact

  • The monitoring and resolution dashboard developed by GSPANN provides a unified view of the health status for 1000+ virtual machines across ten environments. No agents were installed on the servers and monitoring was developed entirely as agentless.
  • With significant updates to the processes, change management, governance, and tools, the client has a stable and automated CI/CD environment to support the delivery of new microservices-based e-commerce functionality.
  • It helped in cost reduction by identifying correct resource baselines for the cloud infrastructure and ensured uptime for all application environments.
  • New application environments are now provisioned and monitored within 5 minutes. Health check refresh intervals are set for 2 minutes, which decreased the turnaround time in identifying the issues.

Technologies Used

MongoDB and MySQL. Application database
Redis. An open-source Barkeley Software Distribution (BSD)- licensed in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker
Consul. A service networking solution that automates network configurations, discovers services, and enables secure connectivity across any cloud
Vault. It secures, stores, and tightly controls access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets in modern computing
Splunk. A horizontal technology used for application management, security, compliance, as well as business and web analytics
Terraform. An open-source Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) software tool that enables developers to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure
Nexus and Tonomi. Artifacts management
Zabbix. A mature and effortless enterprise-class open-source monitoring solution for network and application monitoring of millions of metrics
Git. An open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency

Related Capabilities

Reduce Downtime by Identifying Improvement Areas with a Proactive Production Support

We have expertise in implementing a preventative approach during production support. Our network operations center (NOC) provides deep application and system monitoring to ensure that you don’t face any surprises. Our production support team can help run your application uninterrupted to keep your customers happy and satisfied.

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