How Bugsnag Empowers Namely's Engineering Team with Error Troubleshooting

Challenge: As Namely’s HR offerings and engineering team scaled, it became evident they needed to standardize how troubleshooting software bugs was done. Until then, each engineering team had its own process, and the previous tool they used did not support many of the coding languages used at Namely.

Results: As of early 2017, all of Namely’s engineering teams use Bugsnag to troubleshoot errors. This has allowed them to unlock several benefits, such as becoming aware of bugs and understanding the root cause 50% faster, and improving their customer’s experience by continuously keeping application stability as top of mind.

Namely was looking to standardize the way they addressed errors across all engineering teams in order to remove complexities and save valuable time.

Namely is an all-in-one human resources platform for businesses of all types. As the number of Namely’s HR products increased, so did the number of engineering teams and the different coding languages they used. “Once you move away from a monolith and into a microservices framework you add significantly more complexity to the process,” states Teresa Dietrich, CTO of Namely. “We wanted to remove that complexity by standardizing the way we did error monitoring across all of our teams and languages.”

Namely’s previous error monitoring tool was mainly built for Ruby, and did not support other key languages like .NET Core, which is used for Namely’s core product, Payroll. The lack of language support meant many teams did not have an error monitoring tool in place, and relied on customers flagging errors via support tickets. On the other hand, those who did use the previous tool had limited ability to track errors, and information was scattered throughout multiple applications.

One error monitoring platform for all frameworks

As of Q1 2017, all of Namely’s projects and engineering teams use Bugsnag for error monitoring. Since then, they have reaped countless benefits. Aside from being able to use Bugsnag for all applications regardless of language, they also now have support for SAML and SSO, two very important protocols given the amount of personal information that Namely handles for their customers. Also, unlike their previous tool, engineers can use precise filters on each project’s error data, allowing them to sift through the noise and only get notified of bugs that matter.

“We get information about a bug at least 50% faster.”

In general, Bugsnag has allowed Namely to monitor for errors more efficiently and troubleshoot bugs significantly faster across all engineering teams. Identifying and understanding an error’s root cause is also faster with Bugsnag. “We are no longer going into three different systems to get information about a bug,” says Robert Ross, Core Services Software Engineer. “We can skip logs and NewRelic and get everything in one place.”

Improving the customer experience with quality software

In addition to improving how troubleshooting is done, Bugsnag has allowed Namely to further focus on their customer’s experience. Engineers are not only shipping products with even higher stability than before, but they can also fix issues and respond to customers much faster. “I’ve heard several of our engineers recommend Bugsnag to others,” says Dietrich. “That on its own is a testament of how much value they see in Bugsnag. It significantly alleviates the pain of troubleshooting errors.”

“We are working on more bugs than before and are able to identify them much faster.”

— Teresa Dietrich, CTO