{"id":22303,"date":"2021-03-03T16:42:50","date_gmt":"2021-03-03T16:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pinpointing_errors_in_customer_media_assets_at_cloudinary"},"modified":"2022-02-22T23:42:42","modified_gmt":"2022-02-22T23:42:42","slug":"pinpointing_errors_in_customer_media_assets_at_cloudinary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/pinpointing_errors_in_customer_media_assets_at_cloudinary","title":{"rendered":"Pinpointing Errors in Customer Media Assets at Cloudinary"},"content":{"rendered":"

I still remember well my first week as a DevOps at Cloudinary. The year was 2017. Everything was new to me\u2014people, laptop, processes\u2014all of which to become familiar with in short order. A mantra often repeated to me in those days was that, Cloudinary being a SaaS, continuous service uptime is its most important goal.<\/p>\n

I soon noticed the tremendous amount of vital background data for the matrices that measured our system\u2019s performance. While granting me access to that data, my manager quoted from the movie Spider-Man<\/em>: \u201cWith great power comes great responsibility.\u201d No way could I have guessed then that those words would resonate in my mind for years to come, as if watching over each and everyone of my keystrokes.<\/p>\n

\"Database\"<\/p>\n

Fast forward a few years, and I\u2019m now on the Customer Success Team with a focus on hatching ways in which to better serve our customers. A while back, it occurred to us that since we\u2019d been monitoring errors as a yardstick of our system\u2019s state, we could track the customer\u2019s state in the same manner, too.<\/p>\n

And so was born the open-source project The Sentinel, our customer-monitoring tool by way of following the errors in our customer portfolios of rich media. Gratifyingly, most of the technical infrastructure already existed at the outset. Building that tool merely involved connecting a few software constructs, enriching certain data, and sending the final version to a Slack channel. Step by step, The Sentinel works this way:<\/p>\n

\"Sentinal\"<\/p>\n

1.<\/strong> A lambda function continually queries our log aggregation\u2019s Elasticsearch looking for errors.<\/p>\n

2.<\/strong> Once an error is found, The Sentinel cross-references it with our Salesforce platform to obtain the key data that pertains to the customer in question:<\/p>\n