Snoop Builds a World-Class App with Sumo Logic’s AWS Observability Platform

Snoop, a cloud-native fintech startup, was built using a serverless-first architecture designed to facilitate rapid scalability without the need for additional resources. Snoop’s platform includes an extensive Amazon Web Services (AWS) tech stack along with 14 other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for functions such as security and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). From the beginning, AWS Partner Sumo Logic has been Snoop’s observability platform of choice, helping its three-person DevSecOps team deliver big results fast. Sumo Logic’s seamless integration and automated data collection means Snoop can identify and troubleshoot potential problems before they impact customers. Thanks to the support of the Sumo Logic team, Snoop delivers a five-star customer experience.

Based in the UK, Snoop harnesses the power of open banking to help users take control of their finances. Using the Snoop app, customers can access all their accounts and transactions in one place and get additional insight into their account activities. Since its launch in 2020, Snoop has been downloaded over 1 million times. The app has more than a quarter of a million active users, and Snoop has over 1.4 billion transactions stored in its database.

From the beginning, Snoop’s serverless architecture was built on AWS and monitored by AWS Partner Sumo Logic’s AWS Observability platform. “Snoop is a cloud-native, serverless-first company,” explained Jamie West, head of DevSecOps at Snoop. “AWS and Sumo Logic gave our small team the ability to hit the ground running and then scale rapidly.”

The Sumo Logic platform automatically ingests telemetry data collected by Amazon CloudWatch across Snoop’s AWS stack, which includes Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda instances. Because data collection is automated, there’s no need for Snoop to install or maintain collectors. “Sumo Logic’s seamless integration with CloudWatch makes data ingestion a breeze,” said West. “As a very small team in a rapidly scaling business, that reduction in overhead from an operations standpoint is a massive win for us.” To speed data ingestion, Snoop uses Sumo Logic’s Amazon Kinesis Connector app.

Sumo Logic aggregates Amazon CloudWatch logs and metrics—along with data from the 14 other SaaS tools Snoop uses—into a single centralized analytics platform with easy-to-use dashboards. The platform’s site reliability engineering (SRE) monitoring tools give Snoop’s team the visibility they need to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot issues across their entire stack. By bringing separate logs and other telemetry together in one place, Snoop can more easily identify trends, correlate issues, and understand root causes. “Sumo Logic allows us to easily deep dive logs across our stack, whether they’re coming from our application backend, our MFA provider, or our CI/CD pipelines,” noted West. “It helps us find and triage problems much faster.”

Once an alert is received, Snoop uses Sumo Logic’s Root Cause Explorer to accelerate the diagnostic process. “We average 136 alerts a day, which is quite a lot for our team of three,” West said. “I don’t know how we would even begin to handle that without Sumo Logic.”

As the latest step in its observability journey, Snoop recently implemented distributed tracing across its production environment with the help of Sumo Logic. Using distributed tracing, Snoop can track a request through the many components of its platform and uncover potential issues before they become customer-facing problems. “The combination of Sumo Logic’s OpenTelemetry auto instrumentation layer, collector, and trace visualization UI provides an impressive tracing capability we've lacked,” said Dan Poxton, senior platform engineer at Snoop.

Amy Martin, senior technical analyst at Snoop, added, “Customers are impressed with the quick turnaround of queries that reach us, and it most cases this couldn’t be done without SumoLogic.”

As a UK-based company, Snoop must comply with both the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and Sumo Logic is compliant with GDPR out of the box. “We’re focused on having the right security technologies and processes in place from the ground up to minimize any security risk for our customers,” said Tom Plant, senior DevSecOps engineer at Snoop. “Sumo Logic helps us by centralizing the logging and monitoring of all our security tools. That makes it significantly easier to identify and triage any problems.”

Although Snoop has benefited from Sumo Logic’s technical solution, it’s the relationship with the Sumo Logic team that really stands out. “As a tech company, you inevitably hit problems or have questions about the tooling you’re using,” West said. “The Sumo Logic team always goes above and beyond. As a startup, we don’t have extra headcount to work with, so their support has been invaluable. There’s never been a point where I felt like they weren’t invested in the success of our company.”

Customer satisfaction with the Snoop app has been key to the company’s rapid growth, from startup to leader in the open-banking space. Since its launch, Snoop has earned over 16,000 four- and five-star reviews and a 10-out-of-10 recommendation rating. “You can’t run a successful tech business without understanding and having insight into your tech. Sumo Logic frees us to focus on making sure our customers have the best experience possible,” West said. “We always have our eyes on the horizon, and Sumo Logic and AWS have given us the foundation to scale as far as we want to go.”