Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Fulfillment pipelines for order management in e-commerce have a lot of intricate moving parts that depend on one another. Sales orders, fulfillment, negotiation, shipment, and receipt are closely interconnected but require different actions while depending on one another closely. You also need messaging around order statuses, conditions, actions, rules, and inventory, just to name a few of the important parts of these complex systems.

Synthetic monitoring lets you improve end user experience by proactively verifying that they can complete important transactions and access key endpoints. But your applications serve many users, from customers to all the employees who run your business. This makes testing the performance of any internal-facing services within your private network just as critical as monitoring your external-facing applications.

Talking about competition can be hard. It’s understandable. Product positioning can be touchy subjects especially when those use cases overlap. In the DevOps space, event-driven architectures are certainly not a new concept. Companies like Netflix, LinkedIn, and Facebook have in-house tools built specifically for this type of automation. However, Relay’s mission is make it easy for everyone to build event-driven workflows – not the Netflix-es of the world.

Monitoring requires a multi-faceted approach if DevOps teams want end-to-end visibility and deep insight into issues. This is especially true in the case of modern microservices applications, which are essentially collections of distributed services that talk to each other over a service mesh. With monolithic applications, requests can be tracked easily from the client to the server and back, but with modern applications, every request passes through numerous services before completion.