Driving Customer Success at Sisense Using Logz.io

While troubleshooting and monitoring applications in production is the most popular use case for log analysis, we are continuously learning about new ways our customers are using our platform. We are proud to present the following example of how Sisense — a leading platform for business intelligence that simplifies the challenges of dealing with complex data — uses Logz.io to better support its customers.

Sisense simplifies business analytics for complex data. Powered by its unique In-Chip™ and Single Stack™ technologies – Sisense delivers unmatched performance, agility and value, eliminating much of the costly data preparation traditionally needed with business analytics tools and providing a single, complete tool to analyze and visualize large, disparate data sets without IT resources.

Understanding the Challenge

The advanced technical support team within the Customer Success division at Sisense has always relied on consuming and analyzing raw logs.

Collected from customers, logs are used as the data source for identifying and troubleshooting issues in the scores of services deployed by Sisense. Multiple environments, including front-end and back-end services, generate logs and metrics that need to be analyzed to be able to provide an optimized support experience.

Retrieving the various logs and metrics and then analyzing them to identify the root cause was an extremely time consuming task. While the end-result was ultimately a success, the time and resources spent in collecting the logs and then analyzing them was a constant drain on the team.

Looking for a Comprehensive Solution

To monitor customer deployments of the product, Sisense maintained its own ELK Stack deployed on AWS instances. But as the customer base grew and more metrics were added to the data pipelines, Sisense began to encounter several difficulties — specifically, scalability, stability, and maintenance.

The company began to search for a more robust and complete solution that was hosted and offered as an end-to-end service. After searching for the right tool, Sisense decided to use Logz.io since it complied perfectly with the company’s basic requirements: stability, auto-scaling, good support, and being based on an open source stack.

Transitioning to Logz.io

Moving from the in-house ELK deployment to Logz.io was only a matter of hours, and within one day Sisense already had the pipeline flowing. The team at Logz.io helped customize the Kibana interface by applying new visualizations and was even involved in the development process.

With Logz.io, the advanced technical support team can now tell a completely different story.

Using an agent deployed on the customers’ machines, a total of 20GB of data is now shipped to Sisense and then into the Logz.io ELK Stack. This makes the entire process of log retrieval and shipping a non-issue.

The team can now gain in-depth insights into all the building blocks comprising the platform, including both the client- and server-side aspects of the application.

Dashboards, Dashboards, and More Dashboards

Using the data shipped into Logz.io via the agent, the team at Sisense has constructed to perfection extensive Kibana dashboards to monitor deployments of the platform in customer environments.

Both the client and server sides of the product are monitored with these dashboards, making it easier to identify both anomalies and correlations between the different bits and pieces in the data. This helps Sisense provide accurate and on-point support to their clients, with reduced resolution times.

The End Result

The entire customer success team at Sisense now uses Logz.io as an integral part of its daily routine. Being able to easily access, view, and monitor customer usage patterns as reflected in the logs and metrics shipped to Logz.io plays a big part in the top-notch support the team provides.

Logz.io helps give us a much more accurate picture and enables us to provide our customers with higher responsiveness and increased ability to resolve issues.

As Lian Yagoda from Sisense