Reliability and happy customers with SLOs

• Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

• Professional Service
• Software

• Business Operation
• Quality Assurance

• Predictive Maintenance

• System Integration
• Software Design & Engineering Services

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.

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.

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.

• Laurel's engineering team gained deeper insights into customer experience through SLOs, allowing them to focus on what matters to end users.
• The SLO dashboard provided a clear view of service health, including service-level indicators, error budgets, and error history.
• Sumo Logic's integration with other tools like OpsGenie and OpenTelemetry streamlined data collection and monitoring processes.

• Laurel's team only needed to write 90 lines of code to create a few hundred SLOs for their clientele.