Mangomint significantly sped up team processes and development cycles

Industry

Salon and Spa management platform

Location

USA

  • Since starting using Dashbird, Mangomint has significantly sped up team processes and development cycles
  • Mangomint relies on Dashbird’s Slack notifications to notify them of critical errors and be able to take action immediately
  • Dashbird has given Mangomint’s serverless team the confidence and peace of mind that their app is running smoothly at all times

Starting point

Mangomint offers a salon and spa management and booking platform with smart automations to help salons and spas in the US and Canada cut costs and streamline day-to-day operations. They cover services that help their customers run their entire business from scheduling appointments, managing inventory, taking payments, keeping track of time, to managing payroll.

The Mangomint platform consists of five different apps: web app, embeddable booking app, iOS app for iPhones and iPads, and an Android app.

Mangomint started out building their core technology on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. They use Amazon RDS for their database and are heavy users of Amazon SQS for backend message queueing. They started building their app in 2016, when Serverless was still in its infancy, but they wanted to build their core technology on a proven technology stack. Today, their development team is split between one group of developers working on and evolving their core product traditionally, as a legacy technology stack, and a serverless team working on payment processing data. 

The challenge

With the serverless part of their application being built on AWS Lambda, they didn’t have good visibility of their Lambda errors. And when errors occurred, they found themselves spending too much time digging through CloudWatch logs, trying to locate and debug them. 

“It was cumbersome to get a good understanding of our app’s health in AWS CloudWatch. It would sometimes take us hours before we even started noticing that there was a problem. And not everybody had the skill set to identify what problem it was or how severe it was.”

– Daniel Lang, CEO and co-founder at Mangomint

They felt they urgently needed a faster and easier solution for error monitoring that they could deploy quickly, without a lot of engineering work to set up, and would alert them of errors and warnings as and when they happen (but wouldn’t be too noisy!).

How is Dashbird used?

Dashbird is used by Mangomint’s serverless developer team. They use Dashbird primarily to stay on top of:

  • AWS Lambda observability and operations (in combination with SQS)
  • In-app analytics for AWS services
  • ETL processes using Lambda (for analyzing payment processes data)

They have integrated their Slack channel for quick notifications on what’s going on in their application and if there’s a critical error they need to fix immediately. Since starting to use Dashbird, the team has gained great confidence in their app performance!

Working with Dashbird has allowed Mangomint to set thresholds in terms of setting their custom alerts to only get notified of the events that really matter to them

“You don’t want it to get too noisy where every small error that happens triggers an alert for the DevOps team. We want to know how critical the error is? Is it just that it didn’t work once or twice? Where did the error occur? Maybe it was some kind of third party API that was down for a split second and we can safely ignore it, or is this something that we need to look into and investigate further? We can just get a Slack notification on our phones to make sure that we’re aware of it and could take proper action immediately.”

– Daniel Lang, CEO and co-founder at Mangomint

Monitor serverless applications

The Solution

“Dashbird gives us a simple and easy to use tool to have peace of mind and know that all of our Serverless functions are running correctly. And in case they’re not, we have confidence that we will know about issues quickly and can respond appropriately.”

– Daniel Lang, CEO and co-founder at Mangomint

Mangomint’s system sends thousands of messages through SQS and Lambda every minute. The sheer volume of data is challenging to stay on top of and navigate. Since joining Dashbird, Mangomint have noticed a significant decrease in their MTTD/R from hours to just seconds. 

“We are instantly aware now if there’s a problem. We get a notification via our Slack channel and everyone can get a sense for what the issue is and detect exactly where it happened. We love the fact that we have enough information in the Slack notification itself. So we don’t have to log in to our Dashbird account each time. It saves us so much time and energy!”

– Daniel Lang, CEO and co-founder at Mangomint

About

Mangomint, founded in 2017, offers software for salons and spas in the US and Canada. They aim to build the best tools and services to help their customers automate daily tasks and make running their businesses easier.

About Daniel Lang

Daniel Lang is the CEO and co-founder of Mangomint. Starting from a product and tech background and having worked at a number of venture-funded tech startups, he and his co-founders noticed a gap in the market for salon and spa software to provide a modern solution that uses smart automations and focuses on a fast and intuitive user experience.