Reliability and happy customers with SLOs
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Sumo Logic
- OpsGenie
- OpenTelemetry
Tech Stack
- Sumo Logic
- OpsGenie
- OpenTelemetry
- Terraform
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Employee Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
Laurel is a company dedicated to helping their customers automate time-keeping and billing processes, primarily catering to lawyers who use Microsoft products. The company faced significant challenges in ensuring the reliability of their desktop application and per-customer infrastructure architecture due to the involvement of nine different monitoring vendors. This led to numerous blindspots and a lack of clarity on whether they were meeting customer expectations. Laurel's product and engineering teams recognized the need to overhaul their infrastructure monitoring approach to improve both customer satisfaction and the well-being of their engineers.
The Challenge
Too many monitoring vendors left Laurel with numerous blindspots and no way to know if they were delivering on customer promises. Laurel is committed to helping their customers automate time-keeping and billing processes. Most lawyers use Microsoft products exclusively, so they primarily interact with Laurel’s system through the Windows desktop application. Nine outside vendors monitored Laurel’s systems, making the reliability of their desktop application and per-customer infrastructure architecture challenging. Even with this battery of solutions, there were a lot of reliability blindspots — they didn’t know if they were delivering on customer expectations to manage time efficiently. With only alerts for CPU and memory on their containers, many poorly enriched alerts were ignored. Their on-call rotation was disorganized and included people who weren’t in the company anymore. Laurel’s product and engineering teams took a hard look at their current workflows — and found them lacking. They had to fix their general approach and understanding of infrastructure monitoring and, in the process, improve the well-being of their engineers through better clarity and less stress. Laurel ran a request for proposal (RFP) with nine vendors, searching for a monitoring solution to provide broader visibility. Laurel’s product and engineering teams also decided to take a service level objective (SLO) approach to reliability and set out to find solutions that aligned with this.
The Solution
Laurel had two primary goals: ensuring customer satisfaction and improving the mental health of their employees by focusing on high-value tasks. They chose Sumo Logic as their monitoring platform, which worked seamlessly with other tools like OpsGenie for on-call rotation and OpenTelemetry for simplifying and broadening data collection. Sumo Logic's Reliability Management solution allowed Laurel to define and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs), providing deeper insights into customer experience beyond basic monitoring. The SLO dashboard within Sumo Logic's UI offered an active view of service health, including service-level indicators, error budgets, and error history. This setup enabled Laurel to create generic SLOs for new services and customers easily, streamlining the monitoring process and reducing unnecessary alerts.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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