Empowering Engineering Excellence: Achieving a 26% Reduction in On-call Pages at Amperity with Modern Observability for Logs

Challenge

Amperity required an observability partner to facilitate their transition into the modern engineering era as their previous tooling struggled to support their growth strategy.

When customer data is scattered everywhere, how do you put the pieces together to get an accurate customer 360° view? That’s the power of Amperity’s customer data platform (CDP), and the company has been driving customer data innovation for nearly a decade. Being on the leading edge of software development requires quality observability insights, and the company wanted a new partner that could support their engineering charter for continual improvement and growth.

The challenge? Amperity's observability depended on a suite of tools for logs, metrics, and dashboards. Managing this array of tools demanded diverse skill sets and a significant amount of tribal knowledge to navigate them. And the engineers needed a significant investment of time and debugging expertise to gain a contextual understanding of any issue.

Another notable challenge was misalignment between Amperity’s strategic growth mindset and the limitations of its logging tool. Its ingest-based pricing model meant that Amperity’s logging would halt—full stop—whenever they exceeded the daily limit. As Josh Parsons, Software Development Engineer II at Amperity, shares, “It required constant vigilance about what we were sending to ensure our logging wouldn’t stop whenever we hit the ingest tariff limit. We had this persistent feeling that we wouldn’t be able to scale that constant oversight as our company grew.”

Solution

Josh had a longstanding familiarity with Honeycomb and had previously engaged with Honeycomb’s CTO, Charity Majors, in discussions about their shared philosophy regarding modern observability. 

"I reached out, expressing how much resonance there was between our story and Honeycomb's approach. We delved into the philosophical underpinnings of observability," Josh shared. “From there, it was an easy decision to adopt Honeycomb to elevate Amperity’s observability capabilities.”

Results

Transforming engineering with modern observability for logs

“We adopted Honeycomb to enable a deeper understanding of the principles behind observability. This includes the capacity to handle arbitrarily wide structured events and perform searches against that data to quickly identify and resolve issues 10X faster with a system that delivers sufficient performance,” said Josh.

Now, with Amperity's 80 engineers investigating code issues, they can access a wealth of contextual information with Honeycomb that wasn’t previously available. This capability empowers the team to tackle unknown-unknown questions, grasping the root cause of an issue within minutes.

Consolidating on a single solution for observability and central logging

Shortly after integrating Honeycomb to advance the engineering team's observability, Amperity's security team initiated a project to implement a new tool for company-wide logging and retention. They explored options such as Dynatrace and Grafana Cloud, seeking a solution capable of ingesting logs, supporting metrics and traces, and providing potential for tool consolidation.

It was at this juncture that Josh joined the project, reminding his peers that they already had a reliable solution meeting those criteria: Honeycomb.

Josh explained, "Transitioning our logging to Honeycomb was a natural choice. We could consolidate our tools by leveraging one already in use for observability. The most compelling factor was the significant cost savings. With the ability to ingest all our logs previously sent to our former logging solution, we could sunset that contract without any additional cost to our Honeycomb agreement."

A paradigm shift towards sustainable excellence

Honeycomb was instrumental in transforming the engineering landscape at Amperity, moving away from the “old school” engineering characterized by grueling weeks and overnight pages for support that often led to burnout. With Honeycomb's observability insights, Amperity’s engineers were empowered to transcend these old norms, fostering a culture of curiosity that drives continuous improvement in the quality of the software.

Josh shares, “As the saying goes, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ and Honeycomb's accessibility enables everyone to develop "super debugger" expertise, armed with rich context to proactively enhance code quality. Consequently, our teams are experiencing fewer afterhours page alerts, a tangible indicator of improvement. Analyzing the data from the past six months of engineering on-call pages reveals an impressive 26.5% reduction in pages year over year.”

The most significant gain, however, transcends mere statistics. It's reflected in the improved quality of life, morale, and job satisfaction among Amperity’s engineering team. “We've experienced a palpable boost in morale across the board. As people see these improvements unfolding, they gain confidence in the impact of their contributions. Honeycomb has played a pivotal role in this transformation, underscoring its importance in our journey towards a more sustainable and fulfilling engineering culture,” Josh explained.

Partnering with a company that supports Amperity’s innovation and growth

Honeycomb is the perfect fit to support Amperity's ongoing innovation. As Josh explains, "Quality data and context are imperative to sustain our advancements. The complexity of what we've built at Amperity, in terms of the data customers entrust to us and how we present it for identity resolution solutions, demands top-notch data quality. Honeycomb's observability ensures we get it right. It gives us high-quality data to explore and uncover insights to manage the performance, quality, and reliability of our solution."

As Amperity's observability journey with Honeycomb continues to unfold, their partnership exemplifies an ideal model of vendor collaboration. Josh explained, "I can't express how delighted I've been to partner with Honeycomb over the years. From a vendor management standpoint, I couldn't ask for a better model of involvement, assistance, guidance, and available resources. The generosity of Honeycomb resources has played a significant role for us, especially in helping me convey the observability story internally at Amperity.”

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At a glance

About

Amperity was founded in 2016 driven by a mission to help every brand turn complex customer data into business value. Using patented AI and ML methods, Amperity stitches together all customer interactions to build a unified view that seamlessly connects to marketing and technology tools and helps fuel customer acquisition and retention, personalize experiences that build loyalty, and manage privacy compliance.

Industry

Software development

Products

Honeycomb platform

Use cases
Central log monitoring

Platform engineering and debugging

Application performance monitoring

Results

• Consolidated on a unified observability and central logging tool with $0 cost uplift
• Enhanced engineering culture with reduced on-call pages by 26%
• Boosted engineering team morale and job satisfaction 
• Transitioned to modern, sustainable practices that support Amperity’s growth and innovation
• Empowered engineering team with contextual information for 10x faster issue resolution
• Gained a vendor partnership model with Honeycomb's involvement, assistance, and guidance

"We adopted Honeycomb for Log Analytics to transform our engineering team’s observability, enabling a deeper understanding of the principles behind observability. This includes the capacity to handle arbitrarily wide structured events and perform searches against that data to quickly identify and resolve issues 10X faster with a system that delivers sufficient performance."

Josh Parsons, Software Development Engineer II at Amperity