About Deutsche Telekom
200k employees │ 30 services monitored │ 7 years of Uptrends usage
Deutsche Telekom is the largest telecommunications provider in Europe, delivering cutting-edge mobile, broadband, and IT services to businesses and millions of individuals in over 50 countries.
Headquartered in Germany, Deutsche Telekom drives innovation with advanced fixed network, mobile communications, and IPTV services.
It is also committed to progressing sustainability, for instance with products such as its SmartHome solutions, which enables customers to conserve energy and resources.
Setting the scene
Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta SmartHome product gives customers seamless control of their smart home by connecting devices for communication, climate control, entertainment, and more to a central hub. It works in hand with a parallel product that lets customers interact with the hub via voice control.
These devices transfer anonymized data to Deutsche Telekom’s cloud via APIs, which allows Deutsche Telekom to check if general functionalities for customers are available.
Ralf Sichert, People Lead - Chapter DevOps Engineering is the owner of the business’s Cloud Core and spearheads the SRE & Operations team of 10. “We use Uptrends’ API monitoring and synthetic transaction monitoring to gain visibility of critical backend operations and meet the requirements of multiple development teams,” said Sichert.
The challenges
Deutsche Telekom wanted to be prepared for operational challenges:
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Reliability concerns: To ensure system uptime and reliability Deutsche Telekom wanted to have a robust and independent monitoring solution.
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Scalability and insight: Monitoring internal and external APIs for 30+ services requires a good visibility into metrics such as traffic and availability.
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Minimizing operational inefficiencies: With Uptrends Deutsche Telekom could further refine their notification system and optimize the response times.
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Complex monitoring structures: Uptrends supported the Cloud Core SRE team to divide monitoring into subgroups so specific internal users could securely access the relevant monitoring insights for their responsibilities.
The solution
Multi-step API monitoring: “Uptrends’ low-code setup allows the SRE & Operations team to easily create monitors for APIs,” said Sichert. “This provides accurate performance metrics thanks to Uptrends’ extensive checkpoint network, which tests that uptime and response times fall within our custom benchmarks.”
Integrated alerting and collaboration: Deutsche Telekom uses different tool for issue tracking and notifications. “Uptrends’ ability to integrate with our notification tools ensures the relevant teams have instant access to all the data they need, accelerating escalation and remediation.”
Redefined monitoring structures: The SRE & Operations team restructured monitoring groups within Uptrends to define and manage monitoring responsibilities, enhancing clarity, collaboration, and accountability for specific SLAs.
Enhanced pre-production testing: “We monitor key backend services in pre-production environments,” said Sichert. “With this, we can give developers and testers a status page to identify deployment issues and ensure internal system stability before releasing updates.”
Synthetic transaction monitoring: Alongside API monitoring, the SRE & Operations team can easily configure monitors for multi-step user journeys, for example when users log-in and install devices with Magenta’s smart home wizard. With Uptrends, Sichert’s team can monitor the backend to assure system availability and API performance.
Working with Deutsche Telekom as its business partner, Uptrends also developed the ability to check the functionality of log-in processes that use two-factor authentication.
Results
Using Uptrends improves the reliability of the internal systems underpinning Deutsche Telekom’s smart home offering.
Its comprehensive suite of checks supports the SRE & Operations team to independently verify API health and performance, as well as continually adapt its monitoring setup.
This is especially beneficial as Deutsche Telekom continues to innovate its products, advance its sustainability initiative, and further establish itself within the smart home space.
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