TransportAPI Deploys Code with Increased Confidence and Efficiency

TransportAPI is the UK’s leading managed services provider for transport data, powering over 25% of transport operator apps by operator market share nationally. TransportAPI aggregates open data sources, works with vendors to improve their data quality, blends with proprietary data sources as required, and delivers managed services on top.

The Challenge: TransportAPI manages business critical information, serving hundreds of requests per second and tracking thousands of buses in real-time to distribute key information to customers. Add to this that TransportAPI’s business is highly cyclical, with more user traffic coming online during rush hour, as well as certain days of the week and times of the year. With these conditions in mind, application observability and the ability to reduce downtime were critical for the DevOps team. 

“We didn’t have any modern monitoring solution before Instana. We had to be very, very careful when deploying. We had to test a lot more. When there was an outage, it was a nightmare. Pretty much the whole team would need to investigate it. Before Instana, we were much slower in our speed of development.” – Vladimir Dimchev, Head of Engineering, TransportAPI

With the digital transformation driving increased demands for the speed in which software is developed and deployed, TransportAPI recognized the need for a modern monitoring solution. 

 

The Solution: The DevOps team at TransportAPI began evaluating options for deploying a modern approach to monitoring. Among priorities during evaluation were a platform that could plug-and-play with ease, provide visibility and transparency across the entire team to better bridge the gap between Dev and Ops, and help develop and deploy software more efficiently. While the team looked at DataDog’s offering, they decided to move forward with Instana due to a variety of key differentiators.

“Customer relations with Instana was much better. Support was outstanding. We were able to jump on calls to discuss things as quickly as needed. There was next to zero effort to use Instana. Making everything work with one click was awesome. We didn’t have enough time to do things manually for monitoring. We wanted something we could just bring onboard quickly.”  – Vladimir Dimchev, Head of Engineering, TransportAPI

Deploying Instana was an easy experience for TransportAPI, with key features that provided immediate value including:

• Automatic discovery of events and tech stacks 
• Custom dashboards – with five currently in use
• Out-of-the-box cloud ingestion capabilities, including for AWS
• Application perspectives 
• Automatic alerts for unexpected events

“We’re trying to bridge the gaps between Dev and Ops, and we’re moving in the right direction. A few years ago, we didn’t have such an advanced APM and the process of debugging production issues was a nightmare. Now everyone on the team uses Instana every day to achieve visibility.” – Vladimir Dimchev, Head of Engineering, TransportAPI

 

The Results: After getting setup with Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, TransportAPI is using Instana to track key KPIs. Agreements with customers include SLAs for response time, latency, and uptime. Instana makes sure these levels are maintained, and helps with diagnosing and recovering from issues much more quickly than before.

“Our day-to-day work has changed, now we can much more confidently deploy a new piece of code quickly. We’ll know if there is degradation before it hits production. We can investigate much more quickly thanks to Instana’s metrics. We know with Instana’s visibility, we will catch any issues before production. And we can roll back quickly. We are deploying much more frequently and efficiently.” – Vladimir Dimchev, Head of Engineering, TransportAPI

Instana is allowing the entire DevOps team at TransportAPI to deploy code with confidence and know they can provide the reliability that customers depend on. The solution has become an integral part of day-to-day operations for the team.

Asked to summarize his thoughts on the decision to go with Instana’s solution and if he’d recommend it for others, Vladimir added, “I’d recommend Instana to anyone who needs a modern application and infrastructure monitoring platform. They provide outstanding customer support. They roll out new features with incredible pace. Instana puts a heavy focus on quality. The user experience is really amazing.”  – Vladimir Dimchev, Head of Engineering, TransportAPI