Brisk Voyage saved 10% on their AWS Lambda bill with Dashbird

Industry

Metasearch engine for travel

Location

USA

  • Using Dashbird for alerts, Brisk Voyage has halved the time it takes to verify an error, rewrite code, test, and deploy it.
  • Dashbird’s automated email alerts include all the necessary detail relating to an error, making it quicker and easier to remedy.
  • The ability to identify and optimize Lambda costs and size functions has saved Brisk Voyage 10% from their AWS bill.

Brisk Voyage 

Brisk Voyage helps people find and book cheap, last-minute weekend trips by continuously searching through flights and hotel prices. The business combines the best round-trip flight and hotel offers and sends them directly into your inbox. 

Starting point

Brisk Voyage has always employed AWS in order to scrape Google Flights and Google Hotels. The decision to use serverless was a no brainer for them; it helped limit overheads, ensured more seamless workflows and easier management for a robust but flexible scraping stack, scraping over 300,000 flight prices from 25,000 flight pages per day

Any time the Google Flights or Google Hotels page is updated or changed, for example, a new travel update banner that changes the HTML structure would break Brisk Voyage’s existing crawler. Page changes are the most common cause for breakage and require instant, specific alerts for quick remediation to avoid the entire stack failing and all business stopping. 

The challenge

Using another monitoring tool previously, the email alerts were quick but not detailed enough and wouldn’t allow customization. The lack of detail meant sifting through thousands of logs to identify the issue and its source, before being able to verify the error, write new code, test, and then deploy it. 

The Dashbird solution

Brisk Voyage primarily uses Dashbird to monitor its serverless infrastructure and raise alerts to any part of the stack that requires Lambda, i.e. most of it. This could be from the sign-up emails to the crawling functions and processes to find the flight and hotel prices.

When any part of the stack fails or returns an error, Dashbird sends an instant alert detailing the issue and its source. With all the information in an email and/or Slack channel and with the ability to click through to Dashbird’s platform, the issue verification step can take place almost immediately

dashbird alarms
Dashbird alarms via Slack

Dashbird is also used to optimize and manage Lambda costs and size functions. The right balance is needed to ensure the function is large enough to support what’s needed without overpaying, which as a result wastes computing power and costs. To counter this, Dashbird displays the memory usage percentage on its dashboard giving easy insight into Brisk Voyage’s AWS operations. This enables simple optimization changes to be made without negatively affecting the rest of the workflow

lambda metrics

Since moving to Dashbird, Brisk Voyage has reduced its AWS Lambda bill by 10%, halved the time spent remediating errors, and increased visibility of their overall infrastructure.

Brisk Voyage finds the Live Tailing feature incredibly useful as it aggregates all logs into one feed; having a single page to look through provides confidence and reinforces autonomy over their architecture. It also saves time when making code changes and checking new deployments are successful. 

serverless monitoring

About Gus Gordon

Gus Gordon is the Founder of Brisk Voyage. Gus has always enjoyed working with technology, and loves building useful things for people. He also has an extensive background as a software engineer.

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