The Company
As a fintech company with a customer base of over 300,000, Viewpost needs expansive, scalable IT infrastructure for delivering its invoicing and payment services. At the same time, the company must balance infrastructure performance and reliability with cost efficiency.
That need, along with Metricly’s commitment to customer support, is why Viewpost selected Metricly as a key solution in its infrastructure management toolkit.
The Challenge
Controlling Cloud Computing Costs
When Viewpost moved its infrastructure several years ago to a completely cloud-based infrastructure running on AWS, its engineers quickly realized that they required more visibility into cloud computing costs than AWS’s native tools provided.
“We had to figure out how much our resources were costing us,” said Lawrence “LT” Telfort, Systems Administrator at Viewpost. “We wanted to capture the missing gaps.”
Those gaps included a lack of visibility into questions such as how much memory the company’s EC2 instances were consuming, and whether engineers could reduce costs by lowering memory allocation without sacrificing performance.
Tracking memory usage proved difficult at first because “there is no memory foot-printing within AWS natively,” said Shawn Strickland, Operations Manager for Viewpost. That pushed the team to look for solutions that could track metrics like memory usage.
The Solution
Metricly’s Best-in-Breed Cost-Management Features
At first, Strickland said, he wrote a tool himself to provide this visibility. But as soon as he began experimenting with Metricly, he and his colleagues realized that it provided all the cost-management functionality they required—in a more effective way than their in-house solution (and other commercial APM tools).
“Most tools couldn’t manage cost in any way, shape or form, and Metricly provided better features than we could build.”
With the help of Metricly’s cost-management functionality, Viewpost was able to reduce its AWS infrastructure costs by more than half, according to Strickland.
“We had instances that were over-provisioned, and Metricly helped us see that they were being underused so we could resize them,” said Telfort, who added that Metricly “helped us be more agile with how we use instances.”
Actionable Alerting
In addition to helping Viewpost achieve a dramatic reduction in cloud infrastructure costs, Metricly assisted engineers in improving application reliability and performance.
“Metricly helped us to alleviate performance problems on our most critical infrastructure—our data tier and our operational tier.”.
He also said that Metricly has replaced many of Viewpost’s alerting systems, reducing the number of tools that engineers need to manage—without compromising visibility. “It helps us get actionable data to resolve problems.”
This is particularly true thanks to Metricly’s support for custom dashboards, which help engineers set up reliable monitoring and easy-to-interpret alerts for any type of environment that they need to support. With Metricly, “I was able to create custom dashboards, whereas before we had to wade through so much data” and rely on multiple tools in order to identify problems, Telfort said.
Unparalleled Support
A third key benefit for Viewpost’s engineers is the exceptional level of technical support that Metricly’s team provides. When asked what he likes most about Metricly, Strickland said, “It’s the support engagement, including at the executive level. It is one of the few companies where that is actually a value.”
“I always feel like Metricly is trying to be proactive” with customer support. “It’s rare that it’s a reactive type of situation.”
Going forward, Telfort, Strickland and their team plan to leverage Metricly as they move more workloads to containerized and serverless environments. “We’re doing more and more in the container and serverless space,” Strickland said. “It’s extraordinarily problematic to manage those scenarios, but we’re working closely with Metricly to help us optimize the use of serverless platforms and containers.”