Over the last twelve years, True Fit has built the largest data set for apparel and footwear retailers, partnering with more than 17,000 different brands across the globe and providing personalized size data for the 80 million active shoppers who interact with their sizing widget.
With footwear and apparel sizing becoming more complicated and shoppers spending more time in online shopping carts than in a fitting room, True Fit’s ability to provide accurate data sets has become not only crucial for shoppers but for retail partners who seek to learn more about their digital-first customers.
True Fit’s data and insights also work to inform their retail partners’ marketing, merchandising, product development, and ecommerce strategies. With every type of data that needs to be processed quickly and accurately – without downtime or outages – comes common industry challenges.
Don Jackson, Sr. Cloud Operations Manager at True Fit, said, “For us, delivering accurate size recommendations in a world where fashion and user preferences are continuously evolving is one of the biggest challenges we’re seeing in the industry.”
Other challenges top of mind for Jackson and his team include how to remain cost-effective as they scale aggressively and how to aggregate that data in real time.
Taking it to the cloud
In order to scale aggressively, True Fit’s infrastructure migrated from on-premises to two different cloud providers. Jackson is particularly focused on all facets of the cloud. As part of the platform infrastructure team, that means handling everything from implementation, including VMs, containers, and organizing storage, as well as heavily focusing on the infrastructure that allows the team to do front end hosting and back end processing.
“We have many levels of data that need to be processed in real time, and we built the infrastructure that everything runs on in order to accomplish that,” Jackson said.
Like other cloud-focused organizations, True Fit wanted visibility across their resources, as well as automation capabilities and ease of integration, to work towards reducing any unplanned downtime. LogicMonitor’s robust integrations with cloud providers and features like Auto Discovery also allowed for easy migration, automatically displaying anything that the team provisions in their portal.
“To have LogicMonitor be able to pick up certain cloud resources that all of a sudden exist 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.
“While Google makes many metrics available and provides its own monitoring solution inside of the cloud,” Jackson said, “I’ve worked with setting up monitoring resources and it’s nowhere near as intuitive as LogicMonitor.”
Maintaining SLAs with LogicMonitor
In order for True Fit to deliver on customer SLAs, it is critical for the IT team to understand the way each moving part interacts and affects each other.
“Those insights – without LogicMonitor – we aren’t able to see or understand. We need to be able to identify and alert when an issue arises, as well as see when it started,” Jackson explained.
LogicMonitor has helped provide a guarantee benchmark that True Fit is able to reference when interacting with customers. With LogicMonitor’s clear and concise graphs and dashboards, the team can communicate with confidence what the time to impact was for their customers.
Gaining visibility and insights across True Fit’s entire infrastructure is also key to minimizing downtime and mitigating any risk.
“With LogicMonitor, the biggest advantage is the ability to minimize unplanned downtime and to understand our traffic patterns, which is especially important when we see a massive increase in holiday level traffic,” said Jackson. “It has also helped reduce on-call alerts.”
True Fit has seen a 20% 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.
True Fit also uses LogicMonitor’s website monitoring to ensure that their services stay online and responsive, as well as LM Cloud to ensure all cloud resources and projects are healthy. 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 explained. “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.”
These dashboards not only provide valuable information for Jackson and his team, but can also be shared as an easy-to-use reference point for other teams across the company to improve visibility and overall alignment.
When it comes to monitoring, ease of use has continued to be a must-have for True Fit and the team. Over the years, they have explored multiple monitoring options, from open source solutions to third party providers, but each required more manual configuration or was less comprehensive than desired.
What’s next: unlocking new growth opportunities
As industries and infrastructures evolve, IT teams have to stay agile and prepared to scale as cost-efficiently as possible. As True Fit pursues aggressive growth in the next couple of years, they continue to rely on correlated metrics collected by LogicMonitor and logs from their applications to identify potential service bottlenecks and scalability roadblocks.
Jackson explained that as their infrastructure evolves, they’re currently working towards a much leaner, scalable approach by putting containers into production and transitioning away from dedicated VMs with large amounts of resources.
“For those containers, we need to be able to look at internal services and really understand what resources we need to make available. LogicMonitor provides us that insight to get it right the first time,” Jackson said.
As they continue to work towards hybrid observability, True Fit is currently revamping their techstack 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.
With so many moving parts, accuracy and uptime monitoring are more crucial than ever.
“LogicMonitor gives us a central place to monitor, alert, and triage any incidents that may come up,” Jackson said. This allows them to ultimately minimize any disruptions to their services.
In the last decade, LogicMonitor has introduced many new features that continue to support True Fit’s monitoring requirements and enhance overall customer experience. As True Fit’s strategy continues to evolve, LogicMonitor has been able to consistently provide the breadth of coverage and adaptability to support growth.
Jackson and his team are actively planning to evaluate LM Container as they pivot towards hosting with containers moving forward. In addition to containers, the biggest trends in cloud that are top of mind for True Fit include machine learning and AI.
“Those are the big directions that we as a company are leveraging, and conveniently LogicMonitor provides integrations for those,” Jackson said.
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