WhaTap Labs Case Study

WhaTap

The Challenge

WhaTap Labs is a cloud-based monitoring solution company, whose SaaS-based monitoring service, WhaTap, analyzes and provides notifications to customers about IT services downtime. To perform this well, its own monitoring and analysis service must be reliable too. 

Dongin Lee, CEO, WhaTap Labs explains, “Customers can lose a great deal of trust if WhaTap Labs services experienced downtime, so service stability is very important.” WhaTap Labs initially used on premises data center and domestic cloud companies; however it has found a way to improve monitoring quality and stability when identifying downtime issues.

Lee points out that where servers are located for collecting and monitoring customer data is important, since it impacts expense and network latency. He also explains that it is necessary to consider how quickly they can respond to customers who have international offices as well as within the country.

“Network traffic for the WhaTap monitoring service can be significant, because an agent is installed on the customer’s server and data is collected. When considering this aspect, AWS is the most reasonable choice for most customers.”

Dongin Lee, CEO, WhaTap Labs

  • About WhaTap Labs

  • WhaTap Labs, a cloud-based IT integrated monitoring services company, provides performance analysis services for corporate IT systems, such as servers, databases, and applications. It was the first company in Korea to release an application monitoring solution service for Kubernetes, and has received investment from K Cube Ventures, Altos Ventures, and KB Investments.

  • Benefits
    • Ease of use
    • Stable service
    • Global infrastructure and regions
    • Cost reduction
  • AWS Services Used

Why Amazon Web Services

Lee says, “The WhaTap monitoring service collects data by installing an agent on the customer’s server. By using another cloud vendor instead of the customer’s own cloud provider, network traffic can increase. When considering this, we picked AWS as it is used by most customers.” Moreover, AWS had advantages where it could support customers internationally with its extensive, global infrastructure.

WhaTap Labs has an advantage in terms of cost as well, since the AWS uses a disk with a very high I/O, compared to other cloud vendors, many of which use disks according to the attributes of the monitoring solution. Choosing AWS, which provides stable service and is equipped with a global infrastructure, was the obvious choice.

WhaTap solutions use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the relational database managed service, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

WhaTap Solution Architecture Diagram

WhaTap Solution Architecture Diagram 

Benefits

It became possible for WhaTap Labs to provide IT monitoring services in South Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asian countries from its Seoul head office, by using AWS global regions. This helped ensure that a collection server was provided close to where the customer’s server was located. Also, the stability of AWS cloud services provided peace of mind. Lee explains, “AWS supports stable service at a reasonable cost, and has the advantages of providing ease of management and convenient usage by allowing access at any time and from any place.”

Previously, WhaTap Labs had difficulty resolving issues as it had to send its own engineers to the on premises data center when errors occurred. Now, remote monitoring and specialist diagnosis is made possible using AWS, allowing for quicker resolution.

WhaTap believes it has the advantage of growing its monitoring services in the cloud. When it developed its services in 2017, it optimized its cloud-based application analysis to maximize the performance of customer’s applications, serving customers that have not used cloud services before. Since then, the number of enterprise customers that already use cloud has grown, and hence the advantages of using WhaTap’s monitoring services are magnified.

Next Steps

WhaTap Labs launched a Kubernetes monitoring service as more companies embrace the open source platform. Lee says that, “WhaTap Labs wants to introduce new monitoring solutions suitable for the cloud, focus on securing major companies in-country with AWS, and promote many new things, such as entering international markets.”

Learn More

To learn more, visit AWS Marketplace - WhaTap Labs.