We’re excited to announce that Intuit is one of Wavefront’s newest customers. Intuit worked with us on the 3.0/3.1 release to make our product more accessible and useful to their teams with new features like our query builder, additional dashboard widgets, and advanced functions.
Intuit Inc. is a global company that creates business and financial management solutions for small businesses, consumers and accounting professionals. One of its offerings, TurboTax, is the nation’s leading online tax preparation service. More than 30 million customers use TurboTax to file taxes every year. In the weeks leading up to Tax Day, site reliability is crucial to Intuit’s business.
The Road to Wavefront
Before Wavefront, Intuit had built an in-house monitoring platform from Graphite, Grafana, OpenTSDB, and other open-source components to alert on anomalies in their systems. Though it worked, it took significant resources to maintain and lacked metadata capability. Intuit also realized they needed a more scalable solution because the value of operational data is compounded by correlating across every service.
When Intuit started shopping for a commercial analytics and monitoring platform, they saw incredible variability in the options. They chose Wavefront because it scales easily to their needs, has guaranteed 99.99% uptime, and easily integrates with their systems. Other solutions summarize and aggregate data after a certain amount of time passes, but Wavefront never does. We recognize that historic data is crucial for anomaly detection.
Intuit found that the flexibility of our query language and the quality of the platform allowed them to move from a reactive approach to a proactive approach, catching problems long before they reach the customer. With the previous open source technology, false alarms drowned out the real alerts. Wavefront allows them to find the root of a problem and isolate it.
One of Intuit’s priorities was to have different teams use a single tool, so that they could take full advantage of the correlative functions for locating problems. Intuit gave us early feedback on the 3.0/3.1 release, which helped us understand how to make the query language accessible to more users.
3.0/3.1 Improvements
Wavefront made some major improvements for the 3.0/3.1 upgrade, the first and most important being the new Wavefront Query Builder.
The new query builder allows users to fully take advantage of our time series language without having to master the syntax. Using the Query Builder, users increase their productivity and learn the power of the time series language by exploring functions and previewing results as they go.
A second improvement is the addition of new dashboard widgets:a single stat chart and a markdown text widget.
The single stat chart allows users to plot a single series on a chart and receive a summarized value for that series.This value is displayed in large font on the chart.
The markdown widget allows users to insert detailed descriptions into a dashboard. This way anyone who sees the dashboard can clearly understand the purpose.
The last improvement of the 3.0/3.1 upgrade is the addition of several advanced functions. These new functions include: taggify(), aliasMetric()/aliasSource(), retainSeries()/ removeSeries(), sample(), random(), and limit(). Our community page within Wavefront has an explanation for each of the advanced functions. These functions allow individuals to use our time-series language in a powerful way that wasn’t possible before the update.
Mital Patel, Group Manager for Cloud Enablement and Infrastructure Engineering at Intuit, had this to say about the updates: “The 3.0/3.1 releases solidified our decision to go with Wavefront. Wavefront already had the most powerful query language and the emphasis on ease of use and UI improvements with 3.0/3.1 tipped the scales. Now we have the power of the language without a large learning curve to onboard users.”
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