Onfleet: Dashbird alerts saved us from losing customers

• Using Dashbird’s alerts, Onfleet have been able to prevent customer-affecting risks from escalating into critical stages. 
• Dashbird’s dashboards and search functionality saves users time when monitoring and enables quicker proactive action. 
• Simple access to AWS data through Dashbird has increased productivity and infrastructure insight with less risk and greater compliance. 

Onfleet

Onfleet provides software powering last-mile delivery operations across the globe and across various industries including food and beverage, retail, pharmacy, and e-commerce. Their backend dashboard helps businesses of all sizes to manage their fleet of drivers, while the frontend allows customers to track deliveries and receive notifications and receipts. 

Starting point

Onfleet has always used AWS Lambda within its infrastructure, enabling smoother workflow within its operations. For example, using a third party service to assist with customer mobile communication, one Lambda will run hourly to show this usage and the related pricing to one customer. Another Lambda will then aggregate costs per customer to allow for updates to billing, and have notifications sent out. 

The challenge

While the Lambda usage patterns within Onfleet are well known and mostly consistent, all involve a third party adding an additional layer of complexity and potential risk. When a failure occurs, it’s important for the team to understand if the Lambda will retry successfully, or if instead there is data corruption or an interruption to halt the workflow entirely. 

When it comes to development, distributing failures to the team to resolve or allowing others to view reports, Onfleet wanted to lower the risk of granting access to the information while still enabling full sight and action. 

During initial development of Onfleet’s lambda infrastructure, a lot of time was spent trying to debug lambdas using AWS’ cloudwatch logs. Moving to Dashbird streamlined our debugging and reduced frustration for the engineers working on our billing infrastructure.

How is Onfleet using Dashbird? 

Onfleet primarily uses Dashbird for its monitoring and alerting capabilities. While all Lambda are monitored, the most important are those dealing with billing, pricing reports and email summaries. The Dashbird alerts containing the full issue and related components are emailed enabling quick action.

“Most recently, a Dashbird alert highlighted a condition affecting just a dozen customers, however without this notice, these customers’ accounts could have been automatically shut down due to what was perceived as non-payment” – David Swift, Lead Devops Engineer at Onfleet

In reality, the Lambda invocation had failed, stopping the accounting workflow from completing in those few cases. 

“Dashbird also helps us debug and optimize Lambda runtimes.” – David Swift

Using the alerts and logs, Onfleet has been able to improve runtimes to fit with changing infrastructure requirements, as well as optimizing APIs with third party services. 

From a compliance and best practice standpoint, with their upcoming SOC2 audit, Onfleet will be using Dashbird to sanitise log messages ensuring PII isn’t surfaced. Dashbird also gives Onfleet team more insights of AWS data without direct AWS access, negating the need for an additional IAM user to be set up and potential further access risk.  

The solution

Onfleet’s use of Dashbird provides additional assurance to their serverless infrastructure, through monitoring of key components and alerting of any unusual activity and errors. Their accessibility to AWS data and logs without the direct AWS security risk means that more of the team can view the data leading to greater productivity and optimization opportunities. 

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