Vonage Releases New Features 2x Faster with Epsagon

Since 2001, Vonage Holdings Corporation, a global communications leader, has helped businesses accelerate their digital transformation. Initially, the company offered residential service only but has expanded its presence in the business-to-business marketplace through a series of acquisitions. When Vonage began modernizing its infrastructure, the focus was mostly on shifting from on-premises solutions to serverless and container-based services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that offered architectural flexibility. Teams at Vonage needed visibility into all service data to easily detect problems and resolve them quickly. The company turned to AWS and Epsagon in AWS Marketplace to gain insight into all its microservice workloads, go to market faster, and reduce troubleshooting time. 

Since 2001, Vonage Holdings Corporation, a global communications company, has helped businesses accelerate digital transformation. Its programmable communications platform allows for the integration of video, voice, chat, messaging, and verification into existing products, workflows, and systems.

As an innovator in the VoIP space, Vonage is no stranger to evolving with the pace of technology, and shifting to cloud architecture is its next transformation. When Vonage began modernizing its infrastructure, the focus was mostly on shifting from on-premises solutions to serverless and container-based AWS services.

In a microservice architecture, an application is built using a combination of loosely coupled and service-specific software containers instead of using a single, tightly coupled monolith of code. While this new approach provides agility, it also splits a monolithic data stream into separate reports and data logs for each application.

Teams at Vonage needed visibility into all service data to easily detect problems and resolve them quickly. When issues with troubleshooting and mean time to repair (MTTR) began to increase application latency and downtime, Vonage knew that the customer experience would suffer. The company turned to AWS and Epsagon to gain insight into all of its microservice workloads.

The first challenge that Vonage needed to address was the observability of its systems. The company relied on AWS to modernize its applications and spend less time worrying about infrastructure maintenance. While this was a good cloud strategy, most of the logging and tracking tools available were built for traditional rather than microservice cloud applications.

Unlike modern cloud infrastructures built with scalability in mind, traditional architectures lack this inherent elasticity, making log maintenance a manual and time-intensive process. In AWS Marketplace, Vonage found that Epsagon's solution was purpose-built for its exact needs and yielded immediate results. Epsagon acts as a data hub for all the microservices Vonage uses. It tracks application performance, logs event data and system metrics, and combines information from multiple sources.

According to Tomer Zilberstein, senior technical manager at Vonage, an advantage of this visibility was faster troubleshooting, "Getting all this information into one dashboard allows for complete visualization of our system and all its components. We can easily drill into different areas to find and resolve problems faster in our microservice environment."

Zilberstein's team began using Epsagon after hearing about another team’s success with Epsagon. The original group started a free trial of Epsagon from AWS Marketplace and, after testing for a few days, transitioned to the full production version. That team handled all the calls on Vonage's platform, which meant logging and tracking data on hundreds of thousands of call events every day. Once Zilberstein's engineers saw how well the tool handled this massive data pool by producing insights into performance bottlenecks that detracted from customer experience, they had to try it themselves. Because the solution doesn't require any manual instrumentation to collect the data and monitor performance, Vonage's engineers were able to deploy the solution and start tracking immediately.

Having all the information flow to one dashboard allows the company to achieve end-to-end observability within its serverless and container-based architecture. With Epsagon, Vonage teams have been able to resolve issues within hours, instead of days and fix problems faster, sometimes preventing them from reaching the end user at all. The 90 percent reduction in MTTR allows engineers to invest their time in innovation and release new features 2x faster.

Zilberstein and his team immediately saw how the rising startup could improve daily troubleshooting at a large enterprise such as Vonage. "Epsagon helps handle the sheer number of logs that an enterprise system generates and correlates data from every microservice. If we had to trace an issue in the past, we would go to service A and then service B and dig in the logs to find the flow. Epsagon excels at getting everything into one place and showing the connections between systems easily," he said.

Faster issue resolution has also had a positive impact on DevOps, as engineers are now dedicating more time to developing new features for their VoIP customers. "We run lots of tests on our feature upgrades before releasing them to the public, which creates tons of log data. Getting to see everything on Epsagon and easily understanding where we have issues and what needs to be fixed before pushing to production means we can get new features out faster. Even if we do have production issues with microservices, we can fix them faster, and that's a big impact on the business and our customers," said Zilberstein.

Getting new features out has been streamlined due to a dramatic reduction in troubleshooting time and immediate issue targeting during testing. With that extra focus, the company has rolled out new features twice as fast, which is a competitive advantage for Vonage.

Vonage is using the lessons learned by these initial teams to influence the cloud philosophy of its entire organization going forward. The company has built a cloud center of excellence (CCoE) at its New Jersey headquarters to standardize its cloud strategy. Epsagon's solution has been key to the company's global strategy, and Vonage sees it as essential to its cloud journey with microservices.