AI and data analytics have transformed the ecommerce industry, providing retailers with invaluable insights into their consumers’ wants and shopping behaviors. Without access to accurate data sets, however, retailers risk getting left behind.
Over the past twelve years, leading digital fitting room solution, True Fit, has built the largest data set for apparel and footwear retailers, providing personalized site data for 80 million customers across 17,000 partner brands. True Fit’s data insights help to inform their retail partners’ marketing, merchandising, product development and ecommerce strategies.
With a wider range of sizing options available for apparel and footwear and shoppers spending more time adding to their online shopping carts than checking out in store, True Fit’s ability to provide accurate data sets has become not only crucial for shoppers but for retail partners that seek to learn more about their digital-first customers.
Migrating to the Cloud
Don Jackson, Sr. Cloud Operations Manager at True Fit, believes that one of the biggest challenges the industry faces is “delivering accurate size recommendations in a world where fashion and user preferences are continuously evolving.” For True Fit, this means scaling aggressively in order to process a high volume of data accurately in real time, without downtime or outages.
To meet this demand for scale, True Fit migrated from on-premises to two different cloud providers. True Fit wanted visibility across their resources, paired with automation capabilities and ease of integration, to help reduce unplanned downtime. “To have LogicMonitor pick up certain cloud resources and pull in those metrics – without manual configuration – makes the job much easier,” Jackson said. This reduced the time it would take to set up and parse through the hundreds of metrics offered by a cloud provider.
Keeping on Track with Data
To deliver on customer SLAs, it’s critical that the IT team understands how each aspect of the tech stack interacts with each other. These insights are business critical, Jackson explained: “We need to be able to identify and alert when an issue arises, as well as see when it started.” With LogicMonitor’s graphs and dashboards, the True Fit team were able to communicate with confidence what the time to impact was for their customers. Gaining visibility and insights across True Fit’s entire infrastructure was key to minimizing downtime and mitigating risk.
True Fit has seen a 20 percent decrease in the past year in what they categorize as “high urgency incidents” by leveraging historical graphs to quickly identify any anomalies, such as change in traffic patterns, and proactively resolve any issues before they cause a bigger impact. By maintaining uptime, True Fit helps their retail partners provide a cohesive experience and gain shoppers’ trust and confidence. “LogicMonitor allows us to put a real focus on performance,” Jackson added. “We built many custom dashboards that allow us to put metrics all in one place. They allow us to view important metrics in lower environments when testing before deployment in order to iron out any performance issues before they reach production.”
Looking to the Future
As industries and infrastructures evolve, IT teams need to stay agile if they’re to scale cost effectively. As True Fit continues to scale, they will continue to rely on logs to identify potential service bottlenecks and scalability roadblocks. Jackson explained that True Fit is moving toward a more streamlined approach by putting containers into production and transitioning away from dedicated VMs with large amounts of resources.
As they continue to work towards unified observability, True Fit is currently revamping their tech stack by modernizing their front end, data warehouse, and machine learning pipelines. The team is also focused on revamping their core databases, as well as continuing to integrate performance monitoring with logs and tracing.
Jackson and his team are actively planning to evaluate hosting with containers. In addition to containers, the biggest trends in cloud that are top of mind for True Fit include machine learning and AI. With so many moving parts, accuracy and uptime monitoring are more crucial than ever.
The author, Stuart Carrison, is a Senior Engineer at LogicMonitor.
