By James Michaelis, BMC Helix Product Manager II and Retrace Product Lead
Since joining Stackify in 2014 during the early stages of the startup company, I have had the privilege of working in various roles along the way. I began in customer support, moved to the QA team, and am now the product manager for Stackify Retrace.
Throughout my Stackify career, I have consistently interacted with the software engineering team, customers, and the Retrace product itself. Each step of the way, I witnessed firsthand the day-to-day responsibilities and challenges that development teams face and how they used Retrace to make the team successful.
My experience mirrors the use cases of our Stackify customers, and in this blog post series, I will share my inside-out perspective on how using Stackify Retrace continually improved the overall performance of each team and the success of our product. I will focus on the capabilities we relied on most as a team, as well as how Stackify Retrace helped me in my journey as a support engineer, QA engineer, and product manager.
First up, working directly with customers in the world of support services.
Like most anyone coming fresh out of college, I lacked the practical knowledge of how the technology industry worked. Sure, I had taken a few coding and project management classes, but I knew very little about the challenges of designing, creating, and maintaining essential business applications. I was excited when I joined a startup company that was all about helping application developers be efficient, effective, and successful – even if I didn’t fully know what that meant at the time.
Naturally, I had to ramp up quickly as I started fielding help tickets. And at times, I felt way in over my head. Most users were much more experienced in software development and Retrace, yet I was expected to help them out.
Interacting with customers and learning about the problems they were trying to solve with Retrace was extremely valuable. Questions forced me to learn how to set up test projects in variable languages, troubleshoot production issues in different environments, and properly triage real-world application issues. Properly triaging issues also led to knowing what issues needed to be escalated to our internal SRE team.
Eventually I found myself using Stackify Retrace to better perform my job as a support engineer. Since Retrace monitors customer production environments, I often searched logs in our internal environment to identify client issues. Retrace Centralized Logging quickly became a core tool that I relied on every day to successfully investigate and triage reported customer issues.
Logging in Retrace is especially helpful, enabling you to add user identifiable parameters to a logging object through structured logging. In this case, mapping a “ClientID” property to each unique client. That structured logging functionality simplified searching for and locating issues specific to each customer ticket.
A typical day in the life of a support engineer went something like this:
My daily workflow of fielding, investigating, and escalating urgent priority issues was made easier by utilizing Retrace every day. Finding the root cause of an issue and then properly escalating it – all within the Retrace logging solution – speeded issue resolution and helped me become a better support engineer.
Providing customer support, I was also able to see firsthand how our development team used Retrace internally. Developers searched for specific client issues in the same way I just described, while also focusing on system wide issues.
If widespread outages impacted all our customers (what we called Dumpster Fires internally), the speed of resolution became paramount. Luckily these events were uncommon. But when they did happen, having a monitoring tool the whole team would utilize together was especially helpful and having all hands on deck were required.
The key to resolving Dumpster Fires is quickly finding that specific root cause or event leading to the outage. The next important step is to investigate all the context around that event. Could anything leading up to the outage actually be the cause? Do we know how often the event occurs? Are there any patterns we can identify?
Retrace answers these questions and more by providing context that connects the dots between logs, errors, and traces. Traces provide code-level visibility so you can see where in the code problems happened. Integrated error tracking shows you how often the problem happened. Arming the team with application performance and monitoring data during an outage is vital to reducing resolution time.
From a support standpoint, having the visibility into how customers were impacted enabled us to be proactive in our messaging, which eliminated the need to field hundreds of tickets and made the role of each support engineer that much easier. Retrace also provides contextualized metric, log, and trace data for quickly identifying and addressing the root cause of an issue. Finally, Retrace integration with Jira enables support teams to seamlessly escalate issues that require SRE teams to resolve.
To see how Stackify can elevate the performance of your DevOps teams, start your free Stackify Retrace trial today.
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