The beauty industry expects a large influx of customers during mega events such as the summer season and Black Friday. When such important events occur, if service usage becomes unstable or payments cannot be processed due to a sudden surge in traffic, it can lead not only to business loss but also to financial damage.

Check out how ABLECNC, which pioneered a new market called road-shop cosmetics with “Missha” in the early 2000s, used WhaTap to prevent cost loss and deliver stable and seamless services during large-scale events!

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Introduction: Introduction to customers and the state of infrastructure

Please introduce ABLECNC and the services it provides.

ABLECNC Co., Ltd. continues company-wide efforts to become an organization that fulfills sustainable development and social responsibility through the highest-level ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) standards in a rapidly changing business environment. We present new style standards through various product lines—such as high-quality foundation, color, body, and hair products without price bubbles—and prioritize beautifully improving the lives of our customers and ourselves.

Furthermore, through a global distribution network, the company currently operates more than 50,000 sales outlets in 38 countries including the United States, China, Japan, Europe, and Southeast Asia. It has established itself as a major company in the global beauty market, having been listed for 10 consecutive years in “WWD (Women’s Wear Daily),” a global beauty and fashion journal that publishes the world’s top 100 cosmetics companies annually.

Please tell us about ABLECNC’s current infrastructure configuration.

Our infrastructure physically uses the AWS public cloud, IDC, and in-house servers. Offline store servers are operated through IDC, online stores use the AWS public cloud, and internal vaccines and services use on-premise headquarters servers.

What services of WhaTap do you use?
We currently use WhaTap’s application monitoring and database monitoring.

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Challenge: Monitoring implementation journey and problems solved

Please explain the background behind the introduction of WhaTap Monitoring.

I joined ABLECNC in 2019 to understand the state of the existing infrastructure. When I joined, there was no monitoring in place. The PRM used in stores and the web application server (WAS) in the internal ERP system were somewhat unstable, so I felt we needed to take action before complaints arose from employees. While considering both SaaS and on-premise options, we chose to implement WhaTap Monitoring, which is SaaS-based.

What kind of monitoring did you use before?

I have experience using both domestic and international monitoring tools—from commercial software to open source. Also, since our team members are engineers, we have built our own monitoring systems in the past.

Why did you choose WhaTap among many monitoring options?

When considering monitoring implementation, we tested an overseas monitoring service and WhaTap side by side during the pilot phase. After comparing the two products, we ultimately chose WhaTap. External monitoring tools required additional learning due to UI, language, and usability differences, making it difficult to ensure universal adoption among team members.

WhaTap, on the other hand, had an intuitive UI, fast service feedback, and was easy to learn. We also chose it because it fit well with the keyword “integration,” which was the most important factor in our monitoring adoption.

What were your expectations when introducing WhaTap, and what were the actual outcomes?

The beauty industry hosts mega events during specific seasons. Since traffic volume and resource usage during events can be viewed at a glance, quickly identifying problems is a major advantage. Also, being able to check situations through notifications is very convenient. Although the company sets up monitoring beforehand, it is still difficult to check issues when you are away from your desk or after work. Being able to quickly check status through notifications has been extremely helpful.

Additionally, receiving direct support for monitoring is a huge benefit. We receive great help because WhaTap always actively supports urgent requests via chat, email, and even phone calls.

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Please share your most memorable experience of solving a problem with WhaTap.

Before monitoring was introduced, we had to check each area separately—application, server, and database—whenever an incident occurred. Since adopting WhaTap, we can view the overall situation at a glance through the FlexBoard integrated monitoring dashboard, allowing us to immediately identify where issues occur. Because problem points can be identified instantly, improvements have been made quickly. As a result, response time has improved significantly compared to before monitoring was introduced, and recurrence of issues has greatly decreased.

I read that the number of new customers increased by 230,000 while introducing unconventional pricing through “Nego Wang” in ’23. How was WhaTap helpful during the Nego Wang promotions?

The Nego Wang event begins 15 minutes after the content goes live. At the time, the number of concurrent users per hour was around 12,000 to 13,000. I configured the FlexBoard to collect and display metrics and indicators that could cause unexpected issues. It was extremely helpful to view, check, and prevent problems at a glance without having to review each metric individually.

Of course, we were thoroughly prepared for an event as large as Nego Wang, including the summer season promotion and Black Friday (laughter). With WhaTap, we were able to check real-time service status, and we received a lot of help from WhaTap engineers regarding settings specific to the event.

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Management: Why I recommend WhaTap for B2C companies

What features do you use the most in WhaTap?

In application dashboards, we most frequently use Heatmaps. We troubleshoot by monitoring transactions that take long to complete or appear in yellow or red on the heatmap. In particular, during events, we mainly monitor inflow traffic and resource usage. Based on this, we prepare in advance—for example, scaling up before load occurs. This helps determine when and where load is generated on our system.

In database monitoring, we heavily use SQL statistics. We use it to check how many queries are generated on average and to monitor lock trees.

For services, security is also an important aspect. Since WhaTap enables detection of whether high inflow volume is due to a DDoS attack, this functionality is used frequently as well.

If you have any tips for using WhaTap, please share them.

Our team always displays WhaTap Monitoring on big TV screens. This setup allows us to respond immediately when abnormal signs appear. For companies using WhaTap, one tip is to display dashboards on a large screen and enable notifications so that anyone can easily view them.

Please tell us why you recommend WhaTap.

When comparing the time required to receive technical support from overseas monitoring services versus WhaTap engineers, WhaTap is much faster. From a service operation perspective, receiving quick feedback and applying it to the service is the most important factor, and in that respect, we are very satisfied with WhaTap Monitoring.

Furthermore, WhaTap also provides performance consulting, so satisfaction levels are very high.

I believe WhaTap is the only monitoring platform in Korea that can compare to global SaaS monitoring solutions. I’m very pleased that it has more features than when we first introduced it, and that improvements continue to be made to enhance usability.

What would you say to companies considering WhaTap?

As the saying goes, “Don’t fix the barn after losing the cow,” some may think of monitoring as something used after an incident. However, I personally believe monitoring is a preventive tool, used before failures occur. There is a limit to what people can do manually, so I think it’s better to receive help from tools.

Additionally, when a failure does occur, being able to respond quickly through notifications is a major benefit. For our B2C services, failures immediately translate to financial loss—especially when conversions fail at the payment stage. For B2C companies, monitoring is essential for service operations. Since monitoring helps reduce business and cost losses and is the easiest way to stabilize performance, I am convinced that monitoring is a necessity rather than an option.