Rookout minimizes Rewire’s service restoration time

The introduction of a live-debugging tool has drastically improved issue resolution time.

The Rewire Debugging Challenge

As a financial service, Rewire constantly has to deal with tech complexity and the ensuing challenges that come in the form of security, sensitive data storage, compliance requirements, remote distributed architecture, and much more.

Specifically, Rewire found that when experiencing an issue it was difficult to extract the necessary data from their production environment. Rather, their developers had to resort to adding log lines, measuring additional metrics, attaching a debugger to running live processes, tracing methods, and attempting to reproduce the problem on their local machines. A common requirement when troubleshooting customer issues was to easily extract the HTTP request body.

Adding log lines for the sake of fetching the request body was complex and convoluted, as well as excruciatingly long, stressful, and frustrating for the developers who were wasting much time and even more resources doing so.

Every attempt to debug remotely would result in a halt to the R&D team’s entire development process. This was unacceptable, as there was much traffic coming through from their customers, and Rewire couldn’t afford the ensuing downtime.

Rewire understood that the methods being used were creating much inefficiency and pain among their team and consequently, their clients. They needed – and were looking for – a tool that would allow their developers to resolve issues quickly in a complex, remote environment during production.

The Experience

Rewire turned to Rookout as a solution to their debugging issues that they were experiencing. While they had investigated other solutions, when introduced to Rookout, they decided it was a tool that they had to use and immediately began the onboarding process. “The onboarding process was very smooth. Our deployment was frictionless. It took less than a day for the Rookout SDK to be deployed in 62 application instances and to start collecting data and insights about the behavior of our application.”

 

The Solution

The adoption of Rookout is one that made both management and the development team very happy at Rewire. When it comes to the developers’ experience using Rookout, Or explained that “the developers are very happy with Rookout. When getting to the root cause of an issue, we are able to do it quickly.”

Our developers don’t need to change code and push new releases in order to find the source of the issue. They are able to find the source of the issues much faster and are therefore able to quickly resolve bugs.

As for Rewire’s management, the executives believe the decision to implement Rookout into the developers’ workflows to be a good choice. “

The MTTR of bugs solved using Rookout is significantly minimized. Debugging time has significantly decreased, and when we need to tackle a major bug, we feel that Rookout saves us.

The R&D team at Rewire hasn’t benefitted solely from the improvement in efficiency and bug resolution time. By implementing a live debugging tool, they are now able to solve rare production bugs that were nearly impossible to solve before. Instead of suffering through long and harrowing deployment cycles to get the necessary data, they are now able to simply add a Non-Breaking Breakpoint to get the data they need.

Most importantly, Rookout allows us to deliver features more frequently, while having more confidence in our ability to solve bugs when we release at a higher pace.

“Getting insight into urgent bugs has been extremely beneficial to us”, Continued Or. “As we grow, we can’t rely only on a few senior developers to know their way in the code. We want to bring more developers onto our team, and Rookout will be a tool that will be crucial in helping them onboard and understand the code and the technology that they’re working with.”

Additionally, Rookout has a direct impact on the availability of Rewire’s developers. No longer are they wasting time being involved in investigating bugs and issues due to existing code.

Since Rewire’s first deployment of Rookout six months ago, their developers have placed over 500 Non-Breaking Breakpoints. This has de facto saved them going through 500 releases for adding a log line, and another 500 releases for removing those log lines. With the use of Rookout, their developers are able to focus more on developing new features and code, and less on finding the correct location and syntax for a newly added log line.

We use Rookout to find and help us resolve rare issues. If there is a condition that happens once in every thousand requests, we use Rookout to add the conditions on the production environment, so that we are able to find the source of those edge cases.

 

About Rewire

Rewire is shaping the way international workers manage their finances, helping them create a better, more financially secure future for themselves and their families.

Using innovative technology, Rewire is building the first neobank tailored for the unique cross-border needs of migrants worldwide.

Led by values of equality and social good, Rewire is able to include migrants in the financial systems and enable a fair banking system for everyone.

Their Stack

Rewire’s codebase is typescript with node.js that runs on Kubernetes and Google Cloud.

Rookout allows us to deliver features more frequently, while having more confidence in our ability to solve bugs when we release at a high pace.

Sol Elan
Full Stack Developer, Rewire

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