MyRacePass Goes Full Throttle With Retrace

Like many of our client successes, this one also starts in a basement. Three friends: Zach Calmus, Ross Van Eck, and Josh Holt came together over a love for motorsports and a passion for technology. A few years later, what had become one of the fastest growing motorsports web development companies had grown into the MyRacePass, a platform that would put the entire motorsports industry on a path of acceleration. As MyRacePass began to grow, they transitioned to a cloud-based hosting environment.

Cloud computing would allow MyRacePass to grow substantially over the following years. They knew that to handle this growth they would need an APM tool to help keep up. The ability to identify errors and monitor performance would be especially crucial on those mission-critical race nights.

With growth came more servers, with more servers came more crashes. Calmus was quick to adapt to the AWS ephemeral instance methodology. “We live and die by the idea about instances going down, and we don’t care one bit,” said Calmus. However, it was essential to diagnose errors retroactively once an instance had gone away or been terminated. Enter Stackify’s Retrace.

MyRacePass’ quest for the Holy Grail

After test-driving other tools like New Relic, DataDog, and Loggly, MyRacePass finally found the holy grail, a cost-effective all-in-one solution in Retrace. Understanding when performance issues start and being able to pinpoint the exact locations errors occurred was something MyRacePass couldn’t find outside of Retrace. This was mid-2016.

“Usually within 5-10 minutes we know what’s happening. It’s made our DevOps guy so fast. Now, there’s way less time spent diagnosing an issue than without Retrace.” – Zach Calmus, Co-Founder

During a period of accelerated growth, Retrace kept up the pace

Now, just a few years later, MyRacePass has become the go-to-solution in the motorsports industry. Retrace has allowed the MyRacePass team to find errors and identify performance issues within 5 minutes. During high usage race nights, this short turnaround has been critical.

“Without Retrace, we would likely have a lot more development time to try and figure out what a client is talking about. There would be very little, if any, data for us to look at. Now, we can look at Retrace and see if it was something on our end, or maybe their internet connection.” Calmus said. Calmus also stated that Retrace has allowed their small team to keep up with the growth without adding a full resource.

Favorite Features

Log search and query monitoring give visibility into backend databases

Retrace’s centralized logging has allowed MyRacePass QA to query logs for ongoing monitoring. The search filtering enables QA to get insight at a granular level.

Retroactive data for capturing data off-instance

With Retrace, MyRacePass now has insight into database performance even after an ephemeral instance has gone away.

App scoring helps give insight into what’s working and what isn’t

By using an algorithm that takes many metrics into account on an application’s performance, Retrace can identify which requests are fast, sluggish, too slow, or failed. App scoring allows MyRacePass to monitor in real time how their application is performing.

The ability to have multiple users using the tool at the same time

Development, operations, and quality assurance all utilize the features within Retrace. With that in mind, Retrace allows multiple users to have access to the data they need at the same time.

Slack alert notifications keep everyone in the loop

Keep everyone on the team updated. Create notification groups to delegate specific notifications to specific team members. Once configured, notifications can be integrated with Slack to work seamlessly with the rest of internal communications.

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Mitch

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