Founded in 2005, YourSurprise is an online gift shop with over a 1000 personal gift options. The company provides the ability to make unique gifts and add custom text, logos, and photos. YourSurprise distinguishes itself with original gifts, fast delivery, affordable top-quality, a user friendly website, and outstanding customer service.

The Challenge:
To scale its operations as it continues to grow, YourSurprise is leaning on modern technology and infrastructure. This includes migrating its entire platform to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and beginning to leverage container and microservice technologies for applications. Today, more than 80% of the platform’s applications are now built and running using microservices and containers. This technology migration and modernization created a need for a better way to monitor application performance.

“Application performance is critical. If one application on our website is failing or slow, we have less sales,” explains Niels van der Linde, Developer, YourSurprise.

YourSurprise’s applications are a big part of customer experience and the ability to process and ship orders efficiently. When applications are built, they need to be pushed to production quickly. The company needed a solution with the ability to monitor its entire application infrastructure, including cloud-based microservices and containers, like those running GCP, and empower agile, quick software development. That’s where Instana’s observability platform came in.

The Solution:
“Before Instana we had a slack channel and we’d say 'hey who was responsible for this deployment?' Now with Instana, if you see some latency, you can get the details on that application release, and know who is responsible and get it fixed right away.” - Niels van der Linde, Developer, YourSurprise.

After a smooth onboarding process, teams made up of over 30 developers and DevOps personnel for YourSurprise have confidence as they monitor applications and ensure uptime, with real-time observability into the entire software infrastructure.

“With Instana, we can find really quick relations between issues, so if one service is failing, and a lot of other services are depending on that service, you can very quickly pinpoint the exact service or application causing the initial problem.” - Niels van der Linde, Developer, YourSurprise.

The Results:
Before Instana, YourSurprise would push applications into production without knowing if they were 100% ready. With Instana’s Enterprise Observability platform, developers are now able to configure an application in Instana before it is deployed, and check for issues, instead of waiting for them to happen once deployed.

The YourSurprise team is also utilizing Instana’s custom dashboards for a holistic view into its architecture.
"We created our own custom dashboard in Instana with an overview of our whole platform, with details on CPU, number of calls, etc. We have one overarching view, which is working really well.” - Niels van der Linde, Developer, YourSurprise.

YourSurprise’s business gets busier during holidays, as customers shop for friends and family. This means far more traffic to its website than usual at certain times. Niels mentions that “most important for us is speed and uptime.” As Black Friday and the holiday shopping season roll around, the team is armed with complete application observability from Instana’s solution, which allows for speed and uptime to be kept, even as traffic increases.

“Instana really saves us downtime, without a doubt, because we can see things happening, for example, the SQL database gets overloaded sometimes. We now have the insight to see and fix that before it actually goes down.” - Niels van der Linde, Developer, YourSurprise.