Saatva Delivers Impeccable User Experience by Leveraging Observability

Headquartered in New York and Austin, Saatva, the Smarter Luxury Sleep company, is the largest online retailer of luxury mattresses and bedding in the United States. Saatva designs and manufactures nine mattress styles of unparalleled quality through 19 factories and over 150 delivery partners nationwide.

Unlike most other online mattress brands, Saatva delivers and sets up all its products in the customer’s home, creating an ultra-luxury and hassle-free buying experience. By selling direct to the consumer, Saatva is able to offer the highest quality at the best price.

The Challenge:

Saatva leverages containerized applications for business-critical functions, from website front-end to order and inventory management to logistics and tracking. Some of the business’s key KPIs focus on application up-time and maintaining service level agreement to deliver an excellent user experience to customers.

As Saatva continued to grow its business, it looked to scale up its IT infrastructure and began migrating applications to Kubernetes environments. Eighty percent of the company’s new development is now focused on migrating from monolithic applications and creating new microservices to replace existing functionality. Previously, the DevOps team at Saatva was using New Relic to monitor its application infrastructure.

“New Relic was far too complex for what we needed. Our staff needed full training regiments on how to actually deal with these applications and learn to understand what was there and what to do.” – Chris Miller, Senior Production Engineer, Saatva

The move to modern application infrastructure drove Saatva to seek out a modern approach to application observability.

The Solution:

Saatva’s DevOps team wanted a new solution for application monitoring that delivered observability into all modern environments and technologies, such as Kubernetes while empowering its entire team with the visibility and metrics each team member needed. They quickly selected Instana’s Enterprise Observability platform.

“Instana fit right in with what we were trying to do. Their forward-thinking focus on new and emerging technologies and standards and efficiency made the decision to switch an easy one.” – Chris Miller, Senior Production Engineer, Saatva

Instana enabled Saatva’s entire DevOps team to monitor applications, from more business and sales-focused analytics to technical and functional specifics.

“We rely heavily on Instana to help identify and correlate issues. Because of Instana, we are able to say things like, ‘hey, there was a sales drop that corresponds with a performance decrease’ and articulate pertinent information when issues are detected. Further, Instana tells us when there is a problem we need to dig into so we can make changes as they arise” – Chris Miller, Senior Production Engineer, Saatva

The Results:

After onboarding Instana, the DevOps team for Saatva saw a significant impact, especially from features like custom dashboards.

“The ability to see all of our performance metrics at a glance on custom dashboards has been a huge win for my team, as well as being able to accurately measure and quantify traffic to different services without substantial digging. Before using and relying on Instana for performance metrics, one of our “knee-jerk” reactions to increased load traffic was to scale vertically. Instana helped us visualize and ultimately be the proof that our new infrastructure direction was the correct choice.” – Chris Miller, Senior Production Engineer, Saatva

Overall, Instana has helped Saatva improve its application performance, which results in a better user experience for customers.

“Instana has helped our company in multiple ways. It has helped us to adjust and adapt to performance requirements, pinpoint application inefficiencies or mishandled errors that result in poor performance, and discover areas where our infrastructure could be adjusted to optimize cost savings.” – Chris Miller, Senior Production Engineer, Saatva

Saatva’s Senior Production Engineer, Chris Miller, sums up his company’s decision to select Instana, and the benefits they’ve seen.

“I would recommend Instana to any e-commerce retail brand. When you’re dealing with e-commerce applications, performance is paramount. If your website takes too long to load, if there’s some obstacle in the user checkout process, they’re probably not going to give you their business. Because Instana shines a bright spotlight on where those inefficiencies are, it’s an easy choice for anybody looking to excel in that area.”