Citymaps takes you places with Loggly and AWS

With the excitement of AWS re:Invent fresh in my mind, I’m really excited to share the first joint success story published in partnership between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Loggly.

The portfolio of AWS services and log management from Loggly bring a similar value proposition to our customers: the ability to do more with less. AWS and Loggly are both focused on taking important but non-differentiating work off our customers’ hands so they can focus on innovation. So it’s not a huge surprise that a large percentage of Loggly customers also run on AWS.

How Citymaps Uses Loggly

Citymaps is an interesting startup based in New York City. The company provides the world’s first social mapping platform, running on iOS, Android, and the web. If you haven’t tried it, you should—it’s a very cool service! The company has been a long-time AWS customer and credits AWS with its ability to run efficiently and scale its business. Bob Matsuoka, CTO at Citymaps, reports that the company has only about 50 person-hours per month devoted to operations while running a pretty complex application on 30 servers.

Citymaps uses Loggly in several distinct ways:

• To aid debugging during development: Developers get insight into application behavior from application logs.
• For error monitoring: The Citymaps team tracks overall error counts and looks for spikes.
• For performance tuning: According to Matsuoka, “We can analyze the timing of our various API requests very easily now, which allows us to identify areas that our developers should address.”
• To track business metrics for attributing partner revenue.

Key Metrics to Support Amazon CloudFront Usage

Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery service, plays an important role in the Citymaps architecture. By pushing as much as possible through CloudFront, Citymaps is able to handle 400-500% traffic spikes that occur with major app promotions. However, since incoming requests hit CloudFront rather than Citymap’s internal servers, it was more challenging to determine which API calls were coming from partners using the Citymaps map-generation SDK. By feeding CloudFront logs into Loggly, Matsuoka’s team was able to build reports that track partner usage.

Why Citymaps Chose Loggly

Matsuoka told us that his team researched several log management solutions before choosing Loggly, as well as also trying to build their own log management service.

“We wanted good reporting, and seamless coverage of all of the stacks that we use, along with frictionless implementation,” he said. ”We picked Loggly after a fair amount of research. Loggly makes the management of logs a straightforward process.“

See How AWS and Loggly Work Together

I encourage you to read the case study to learn more about the Citymaps deployment. You’ll gain more interesting insights into why Citymaps says that they can’t imagine running without AWS and Loggly.

Don’t forget try creating your own maps on Citymaps!

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