How Digibee Bridged the APM<>K8s Reliability Gap with Komodor

About Digibee

Founded in 2017, the Digibee team is based throughout the Americas to build a platform that allows enterprises to compete and excel in today’s rapidly changing digital environment. The technology is cloud-native, low code, fully recyclable, and discoverable—connecting applications, processes, and people for faster time-to-market without a major investment.

Digibee is the preferred iPaaS solution for 250+ corporate customers including Assai, B3, Barkley, Bauducco, GoPro, Oobe, Payless, and others.

The Problem

Disclaimer: Digibee is a heavy user of the industry-leading APM solution. For the purpose of this case study, we shall refer to it simply as “The APM”.

Digibee, an innovative and forward-thinking company, aimed to shift left Kubernetes operations to empower their developers to independently monitor and troubleshoot their applications. However, there was a significant knowledge gap between the development and operations teams.

Digibee lacked developer-friendly tools for Kubernetes, as their APM of choice was too complex and overwhelming for non-experts, resulting in low internal adoption rates. While the team utilized the industry’s leading APM solution, it didn’t address the challenges the team was having with their Kubernetes layer. It could show metric spikes but failed to provide meaningful insights into whether something was wrong, why it happened, its impact, and how to fix it.

Tiago Bernardinelli, Director of Software Engineering at Digibee, had a vision of building a platform to empower developers to own their applications e2e and to streamline the SDLC. The key to making this vision a reality was to enable K8s for developers and close the reliability gap left by their APM solution.

Tiago led the POC that successfully tested which APM components can be replaced by Komodor and how Komodor could improve MTTR, developer adoption, dev velocity, and overall Kubernetes reliability. 

The Challenge

Developers at Digibee were responsible primarily for writing code, with every next step; building images, deploying, monitoring, and troubleshooting being a black box to them. This old way of doing things can’t fly in the cloud-native era and requires a significant cultural shift on top of the transformation in tech and processes.

Digibee’s goal was to enable developers to own their applications end-to-end. However, getting developers to adopt new tools, particularly Kubernetes operations tools, was a significant challenge. 

While the APM provided valuable metrics and logs, it fell short in several critical areas:

• Lack of Kubernetes-Specific Insights: It could highlight spikes in metrics but failed to provide deeper insights into whether something was genuinely wrong, why it was happening, the impact, and how to fix it. It didn’t address the Kubernetes layer, which is vital for maintaining modern cloud-native applications. 

• Reactive Approach: The APM’s approach was largely reactive, requiring users to perform manual analysis and correlation to detect and understand issues. As Tiago from Digibee noted, “You need to tell ‘the APM’ what to do. Komodor tells YOU what to do.”

• Insufficient AI Capabilities: Their AI assistant aimed to help navigate through the vast amount of data but often fell short in providing actionable insights. Tiago highlighted this by saying, “I still need to do my own manual investigation and thinking around all the data points.”

The Solution

Realizing the limitations of APMs for Kubernetes monitoring and troubleshooting, Digibee decided to transition to Komodor and opt out of the APM’s container monitoring solution, while retaining some of the other solutions like log management.

The decision was made despite the slightly higher monthly cost of approximately $3k, because of the significant benefits Komodor offered, which far outweighed the price difference. Considering the time and resources saved and the potential cost savings provided by Komodor’s cost optimization capabilities, the transition to Komodor is extremely ROI positive.   

The Added Value of Komodor

• Intelligent Correlations Instead of Raw Data [Holistic Approach]: Unlike APMs, Komodor takes a holistic approach to monitoring. It doesn’t just dump metrics from every container but looks for meaningful trends and dependencies. This proactive analysis provides a more complete picture of the Kubernetes environment and tells the full story of every incident.

• Continuous Reliability Management and Auto-Remediation [Proactive Monitoring and Insights]: Komodor bubbles up important data, performs background analysis, and provides actionable insights out of the box. This proactive approach reduces the need for manual correlation and analysis, saving valuable time and resources.

• Instant Developer Adoption: One of Digibee’s biggest challenges was getting developers to adopt the APM and integrate it into their daily workflows. Komodor, on the other hand, provided so much value out of the box that developers could get started in no time with minimal manual configuration. As Tiago put it, “With Komodor – instant adoption! Komodor translates K8s to human.”

This proactive approach meant that developers didn’t need to configure or correlate data manually, as Komodor bubbled up important information automatically, and wrapped it in the relevant context. As a result, Komodor provided immense value immediately, allowing developers to get started quickly without much manual configuration and enablement. “Instant adoption”  

This shift enabled Digibee’s developers to take full ownership of their applications, from development to deployment and monitoring, significantly enhancing their operational efficiency and capacity to innovate.

Strategic Shift-Left Initiative

Komodor is playing a crucial role in Digibee’s strategic shift-left initiative. Tiago’s goal is to enable developers to own their applications end-to-end, and he sees Komodor as a key enabler of this cultural and technological shift.

With Komodor, Digibee can free up engineering time to invest in strategic, long-term projects instead of being bogged down by day-to-day maintenance. Or in Tiago’s words, “Thanks to Komodor, I can free up engineering time to invest in strategic, long-term projects, instead of just day-to-day maintenance.”

In summary, Komodor has been a game-changer for Digibee, filling the reliability gap left by their APM solution and enabling a more proactive, holistic approach to Kubernetes management.