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Xiggit’s mission is to help build financial resilience within working communities, and through their platform they are helping small businesses provide affordable benefits to hourly and gig workers that would otherwise not easily have access to healthcare and retirement benefits.
Xiggit’s Technology Stack
Xiggit’s platform helps employers and employees manage their benefits, save for retirement and provides financial planning assistance. The employer portal and consumer-facing application are React-native and supported by a backend that is 100% serverles and deployed with the Serverless Framework. Xiggit leverages many of AWS serverless services including AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Step Functions and SNS.
The Challenge
Although Xiggit was using a well-known monitoring tool, when issues occurred in their serverless environments, it was still a significant challenge to pinpoint the root cause. In one instance, several Lambda functions and Step Functions running batch jobs were throwing throttling errors. Xiggit’s monitoring tool was pointing to Lambda as the root cause, but AWS reported that it wasn’t Lambda, and the issue was coming from a downstream service. Unable to trace transactions end-to-end with the tools they had, Xiggit had no way to easily identify which downstream service was actually throttling.
The Solution: Troubleshooting built for Serverless
With critical gaps in tracing that impacted their ability to effectively troubleshoot, Xiggit was looking for a solution that could actually trace across every service in a transaction, end-to-end. Xiggit co-founder and CTO Michael Blanton was introduced to Lumigo through a webinar, and having seen its powerful distributed tracing capabilities, decided to try out Lumigo to help with their throttling issues.
Easy to set up using the Lumigo plugin for the Serverless Framework, Xiggit was immediately able to identify the exact downstream service that was throttling. “We hadn’t seen a tool that could actually trace our serverless apps fully, until Lumigo,” said Blanton. “We left our old monitoring solution behind, and have been using Lumigo ever since,” he continued.
““We hadn’t seen a tool that could actually trace our serverless apps fully, until Lumigo. We left our old monitoring solution behind, and have been using Lumigo ever since,” he continued.”
– Michael Blanton, CTO and co-founder, Xiggit
Benefits and Results
Using Lumigo helped Xiggit reduce the time it takes to resolve issues from hours, sometimes days, to just minutes. “We could instrument a whole bunch of logging to figure out what is happening, or we can just use Lumigo,” said Blanton. “Lumigo eliminates the need for us to go back and forth with adding logs, updating code and redeploying. Lumigo traces everything and also makes it easy to search for specific invocations and services.”
Xiggit uses the full power of Lumigo with autotracing setup for their entire serverless environments and with notifications sent directly to Slack and issues pushed to Jira, the team is able to stay on top of any issues. The team also uses Lumigo to get ahead of any issues before they have a real impact.
“We use Lumigo’s explore dashboard a lot to look into the services or vendors we’re making calls to. The request and response is right there and we use that to see where services could possibly break or are not working exactly the way we want them to.” said Blanton.
Xiggit is also leveraging Lumigo to improve performance of their serverless applications. With Lumigo’s tools for identifying cold starts, timeouts and other latency impactors, Xiggit knows exactly where optimizations should be made. “You can see how long calls are taking, in what order and where your code is sitting waiting so we can adjust accordingly. The visibility we get with Lumigo has made a huge difference.”
