Payments innovator uses Elastic Observability to cut issue detection time, improving application performance for customers and accelerating new products

As its infrastructure evolved, WePay’s previous logging solution struggled to keep up with these objectives. It was prone to failures, needed manual intervention, and prevented WePay engineers from focusing on adding value to the business. In addition, logging, metrics and trace data was distributed across different vendor solutions.

“We needed to consolidate our monitoring and compliance tools to streamline the log analytics and improve the performance of our infrastructure and applications,” says Kartik Deshpande, Staff Software Engineer, WePay.

WePay researched the market and decided to deploy Elastic Observability as a single solution for all logging across development, stage, pre-production and production environments managing 500TB of data.

Elastic Observability delivers the ability to break down silos and aggregate all telemetry including log data while delivering the choice to control data retention. Cross-cluster search is a key capability that allows the ability to search across multiple clusters enabling data from multiple sources to be visualized and analyzed via built-in Elastic dashboards for up-to-the-minute, comprehensive reporting.

Using Elastic Observability as the single source for logging data enables WePay to identify infrastructure and application issues more quickly as well as undertake sophisticated analytics.

WePay has also improved the efficiency of its fintech compliance protocols, particularly the retention of critical logging data. For the first 90 days, data is stored in Elastic so that WePay can quickly address short term audit inquiries. Older data is transferred to Google Cloud for longer-term auditing requirements.

WePay sees potential for using Elastic along with Google Cloud Storage for long-term data storage and retrieval. This includes Elastic frozen tier storage and comprehensive search and data analytics capabilities that can further reduce storage and operating costs.

Elastic also supports WePay’s mission to continually innovate its services and maintain its market leading status. Developers use Elastic Observability to monitor logs for errors in applications that are in development, accelerating the move to production and the delivery of new capabilities for customers.

WePay uses Elastic to build dashboards for log reviews and searches. This includes analytics for its technical account management team which ensures that WePay customers continue to get the most out of their deployment.

After improving its customer experience with Elastic Observability, WePay then looked to Elastic to help protect its data by deploying Elastic Security because when you observe, why not protect? Elastic Security is now the backbone of the security team’s operations that protects the business against external threats. This includes Watcher, an Elastic Security feature that WePay uses to analyze business-critical streaming data while receiving proactive alerts of suspicious activity. As a financial services organization that must adhere to regular audits, Elastic Security ensures that WePay meets all compliance regulations.

Deshpande also highlights the support offered by Elastic Professional Services which helped accelerate the time to production by helping to identify ways to improve search. Elastic Consultants worked with WePay to enable its developers to see all logs and see how an app is performing once deployed. From a workflow perspective this has given a much broader visibility into monitoring anomalies so the team can now determine where issues are and what needs to be done to be resolved. Dev, Stage, and Prod all have logs going into Elastic. “As an innovative tech company, we set very high standards for our IT partners. When we needed assistance during our Elastic deployment, Elastic Professional Services worked side by side with us,” says Deshpande. “There’s a great deal of respect between the teams for their technical expertise.”

Deshpande also sees enormous potential for other Elastic applications in the future. These include plans to use Elastic APM to quickly identify and resolve root cause application issues with correlated traces, logs, and metrics. Elastic APM will also offer deeper visibility of WePay applications with extensive support for popular languages, OpenTelemetry, and distributed tracing.