“Parking Cloud runs 4,200 parking lots in Korea and each parking lot has at least 2 or 3 computers. Only the WhaTap solution can monitor 10,000 devices at a time.”
- Sang-min Lee, CTO of Parking Cloud -
You can see the parking payment machine before you leave the parking lot at E-Mart. Let’s listen to Sang-min Lee, CTO of Parking Cloud that is operating the parking infrastructure and its system “i-Parking.” He explains how the i-Parking system is monitored.
Would you please introduce your company, “Parking Cloud” and the CTO’s role?
Parking Cloud is the number one parking solution provider in Korea that is developing both hardware and software. I am managing the hardware and software development team as a CTO of Parking Cloud. Generally, a parking company has its machines only in parking lots. We can integrate all machines to manage them centrally. The IT infrastructure consists of multi-clouds for AWS and NHN IDC.
How are your DevOps team using the WhaTap solution?
Java backend developers and infrastructure engineers are monitoring all resources and applications with the WhaTap solution. You can think that most backend developers are seeing the WhaTap screen. A monitoring display is attached to each office. The screen of the WhaTap solution is always displayed so that we can watch the monitoring status anytime. When any issues happen, the corresponding screens are captured and shared. Accordingly, the development team can communicate to analyze the issues and problematic indicators. Especially, our senior developers consider the solution as mandatory.
What made you choose the WhaTap solution?
First of all, we wanted to grow together with WhaTap Labs. In order for the WhaTap solution to go global, I thought that its solution needs to monitor numerous servers at a time. Recently, a service is divided into small ones based on the MSA (Micro Service Architect). We thought that the experience of monitoring thousands of infrastructures and MSA services such as i Parking, can provide a great opportunity for advancement of WhaTap Labs.
When we encountered technical problems, people in WhaTap Labs showed a willingness to reflect or improve the issues as much as possible.
Would you please introduce any frequently used menus or functions of the WhaTap monitoring service?
The service is being widely used in the order of applications, servers, and DBs. As I mentioned, I am always seeing the WhaTap screen in my office to recognize any problems. We monitor resources in the field with a unified dashboard and monitor any failures with an integrated matrix board.
How did you benefit from using the WhaTap solution?
Upon any failures, we bring up the WhaTap screen. Its notifications are delivered through various routes, so we can easily recognize failures quickly. Because multiple notifications may appear, we should elaborately set up notifications that are really needed. We set up only the notifications that are really important and needed for application monitoring. Accordingly, we can immediately recognize any failures.
The WhaTap solution is not the service that only informs you upon any problems or failures. The service can also analyze the causes of failures. For example, it has a structure that allows you to easily recognize failures for networks, applications, related services, or databases. Accordingly, we have found and resolved failures frequently, and could find their causes easily.
What if you recommend the WhaTap solution to other companies that want to monitor numerous infrastructures?
Parking Cloud has approximately 4,200 parking lots nationwide. There are at least 2 or 3 computers in a parking lot. Therefore, a total of 10,000 computers or more can exist in 4,200 parking lots. To monitor infrastructures with large capacity, we used to run in-house solutions. The WhaTap solution is a Korea’s unique SaaS monitoring service that can monitor massive-volume resources. Currently, we installed the WhaTap solution in all i Parking fields for resource monitoring. I think this commercial reference indicates that the service has been verified.
Please feel free to share your opinions, questions, and requests if any.
When redeveloping, supplementing, and analyzing applications (services), it would be better to monitor them from marketing and service planning perspectives. For example, we need a flow to call service screens. It would be better if the scope of service is expanded not only to developers/operators but also to marketing/sales staffs and service planners in complementing and analyzing the service, considering the itinerary and user patterns.
As a result, we are confident that it will be actively used as a decision-making tool across the enterprise.