Building an Always-on Business Leaves No Room for Downtime
As is often the case with digital products, your users could be experiencing issues you might not be aware of. The unknown unknowns could include random bugs or memory leaks slowing down performance and, in many cases, those issues aren’t reported… folks just bail.
If uptime is a core tenet of your business success, unreported issues and users moving on to the next best thing isn’t an option. Take San Francisco-based Arcade for example.
Designed by technologists who’ve built products at Atlassian and LaunchDarkly, Arcade empowers everyone to build, manage, and publish interactive demos in just a few clicks. This gives creators the tools they need to feel proud of their work—and show it off in magical, high-impact experiences on websites, social media, and beyond.
“Our product is highly visible. Organizations use Arcade on landing pages that are viewed thousands of times over. Simply put, they have to work… always,” says Rich Manalang, Arcade CTO & Co-founder.
No second chances
Arcade’s published demos get tens of thousands of unique views per month across website properties, and they’re currently growing in volume by ~2x month over month. As a result, the potential impact on someone else’s ability to showcase their product carries inherent risk. To support that growing audience, they’re committed to achieving 100% crash-free sessions with every release… no pressure.
Just the other day Rich and his team noticed that their Chrome extension was failing… nothing huge, but something that could’ve impacted the user experience. Using Sentry, and leveraging the ability to upload source maps, they were able to dig deeper, quickly identify the source behind the issue and solve it before it could grow into a bigger problem.
As it turns out, the issue surfaced because the team uses certain browser features that aren’t supported universally across operating systems just yet. But that comes with the territory; delivering a digital product doesn’t happen in a vacuum and third-party tools and core technologies can impact performance based on their respective updates and new releases.
“We have an always-on business that other organizations rely on, there’s no room for downtime and Sentry has become an essential business driver for us in this sense,” says Rich, adding that his team pays close attention to “the characteristics in the metrics that Sentry provides. In particular, we want to know whether from release to release, our product gets faster or slower.”
If you’d like to learn more about how the Arcade team approaches release health and manages 100% uptime, check out our full conversation with them here.
And if you’re new to Sentry, you can try it for free today or write to sales@sentry.io to get started.