As commerce experts, Isobar’s holistic approach to e-commerce includes planning, design, and development of solutions that deliver rapid growth for global brands and retailers. To make sure they keep their promise of unmatched service and performance, Isobar relies on Uptrends' availability, performance, and transaction monitoring to keep their customer’s websites in check. In this interview, we talk with Marin Karadjov, Senior Technical Support Analyst at Isobar.
Isobar has launched and maintains over 170 sites for 25 global brands in over 30 markets on five continents. To keep these e-commerce solutions optimized and ensure Isobar meets the requirements of their SLA (Service Level Agreement), Isobar utilizes several hundred Uptrends monitors including uptime, DNS, FTP, web service, Full Page Checks, and transactions. A team of more than 30 people in two locations tracks the performance and availability for their customers 24/7.
A partnership based on flexibility and continued growth
Technology constantly changes, and as it does, Uptrends is always searching for new ways to incorporate the new technology into the Uptrends products and provide customers with smart solutions.
“The working versatility and the working possibilities of Uptrends is quite essential for us.”
Over the years, Uptrends has expanded beyond the boundaries of availability monitoring to include performance monitoring with the Full Page Check, Real Browser Monitoring, and transaction monitoring. Isobar has been right beside us all the way.
“We decided to adopt Uptrends for our primary monitoring—well, for pretty much everything that we do, and over time the features and functions that Uptrends provided evolved. We got used to this continuous evolution, and we adopted some more functions over time. Initially, it was simple availability monitoring, but over time, we adopted transaction monitoring and performance monitoring. The working versatility and the working possibilities of Uptrends are quite essential for us. Uptrends is the Swiss Army Knife of online monitoring, only more versatile and reliable.”
A worldwide market requires a global solution
With world-class customers, Isobar needs to know that their customer’s sites remain available, have a high level of performance, and they function properly. Isobar keeps Full Page Checks aimed at all of their customer sites.
“Uptrends is the tool that we use to validate that our site is locally available for the target audience.”
The Full Page Check enables Isobar to see performance and availability from the perspective of the site’s users using Uptrends' 233 worldwide checkpoints.
“The multiple checkpoints that Uptrends has are amazing. They give us a very good overview of a site’s geographical availability; for example, if we have a DNS issue with a given site that is for the US market only, it is very easy to spot that the site is not available in the region where it is supposed to be available. Even when we check it locally and it’s available. Uptrends is the tool that we use to validate that it isn’t locally available for the target audience.”
Alerts that fit your team’s style
Uptrends gives you multiple ways to keep your team informed: SMS, email, push notifications, phone/voice, webhooks, and integrations with Slack, PagerDuty, StatusHub, VictorOps, and ServiceNow. You can pick the alerting method based on the operator, recipient, or level of escalation (up to four levels). Isobar utilizes nearly all of Uptrends' alert methods to keep their team and customers notified.
“If anywhere in the world something goes wrong with any of our sites or integrations, it’s quite likely that Uptrends will be the first monitoring system to alert us. That’s why we use different alert definitions. We are quite open with our retailers, so when we receive an alert for a site that’s become unavailable, our retailer also receives the same alert. We often use Uptrends’ alert time stamps for providing root-cause analysis. The alerts' timestamp will be the official measure for giving the total downtime of a given site.”
Transaction monitoring and unmatched customer service
Isobar uses several transaction monitors to check on the functionality of their retail sites.
“It is easy to record a transaction. Uptrends’ amazing transaction consultants do the rest, and these guys do miracles. I’m being honest about this.”
With transaction monitoring, Isobar knows immediately if something goes wrong with their customer’s login forms, shopping carts, or checkouts, but scripting those transactions isn’t where Isobar wants to invest time and energy. Although Isobar could maintain and manage the scripts themselves, why should they? Why put resources on transaction scripting when Uptrends can do it for them?
“It is easy to record a transaction. Uptrends’ amazing transaction consultants do the rest, and these guys do miracles. I’m being honest about this. The last transaction that I asked Uptrends to fix because we had a lot of layout changes on the site, they did a wonderful job, and the way they configured the transaction was not what I wanted, it was way better.”
When it came to Uptrends support in general, Marin had more to say.
“Being a support person, my opinion on your support team is that they are amazing. They are very professional and very functional. Every issue that I’ve had ever with Uptrends was resolved with very high quality of resolution. A fast workaround was never the primary objective, so the quality of resolution was the result. I’m really impressed by the level of professionalism of your support; very nice guys, very polite, very professional, it’s amazing. If you want to score them out of 10, I’ll give them an 11!”