EDTS (Elevenia Digital Teknologi Sukses), the IT arm and digital enabler of Indonesia’s conglomerate Salim Group, is responsible for ensuring the technological stability of various critical businesses, including the e-commerce platform Klik Indomaret. Located at Wisma BNI 46, EDTS manages numerous projects that require 24/7 support. However, as they scaled, they faced significant hurdles in monitoring efficienty, cost management, and rapid issue resolution within their microservices architecture.

To overcome these operational bottlenecks, EDTS evaluated several global monitoring solutions and ultimately selected WhaTap. WhaTap was the only solution that offered an all-in-one package capable of providing end-to-end visibility without the need for complex integrations.

In this article, we will examine the critical challenges EDTS faced, why they chose WhaTap as their strategic partner, and the quantitative outcomes achieved since adoption.

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Challenges: The 3 main challenges EDTS faced

EDTS understood that for a digital enabler supporting a massive conglomerate, IT reliability is directly linked to client revenue. However, their existing tools were limiting their ability to support clients effectively. There were 3 main challenges that needed immediate addressing:

Inefficient Troubleshooting with Fragmented Tools

‍Before adopting WhaTap, EDTS relied on monitoring tools that were limited to basic log-ins and scattered data sources. When an issue occurred, the operations team had to manually search through multiple disparate systems to find the root cause. This fragmented approach made troubleshooting extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive, which was a critical weakness for a team providing 24/7 support.

Lack of Visibility in Microservices Architecture

‍EDTS utilizes a microservices architecture to manage its backend operations. While this offers flexibility, it also created a "black box" effect where tracing the source of an error across interacting services was difficult. Without a specialized tool to visualize the flow between services (Service A to Service B to Service C), identifying exactly where a failure originated was a struggle, delaying resolution times.

Business Risk due to Delayed Resolution

‍For EDTS’s clients, particularly large e-commerce platforms like Klik Indomaret, uptime is revenue. The delay in detecting and fixing issues due to the limitations of previous tools meant prolonged downtime or degraded performance for end-users. This not only affected the user experience but posed a direct threat to the clients' business performance and revenue streams.

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Solution: Optimizing IT operation with WhaTap

To solve these complex operational issues, EDTS conducted a Proof of Concept (PoC) with several monitoring products. They chose WhaTap because it provided a comprehensive, "built-in" solution where all features were unlocked upon installation, unlike competitors that required combining multiple separate tools.

End-to-End Visibility with Hit Map

‍The most critical feature for EDTS was WhaTap’s Hit Map and its multi-transaction tracing capability. This feature provided immediate visibility into the microservices environment, allowing the team to trace issues from the front end to the back end. By visualizing the entire transaction path, EDTS could pinpoint exactly which service caused a bottleneck or error, transforming a complex debugging process into a simple task.

Strategic Resource Management via Daily Status

‍EDTS utilized WhaTap’s 'Daily Status' feature to make data-driven decisions regarding infrastructure. For instance, during high-traffic events like HARBOLNAS (National Online Shopping Day), EDTS analyzed data from previous days to determine if server specifications needed to be scaled up. This moved their operation from reactive firefighting to proactive capacity planning.

Dedicated Technical Support

‍A key factor in the successful adoption was WhaTap’s support. Despite EDTS initially having no experience with the product, WhaTap provided exceptional local support, including deploying technical experts directly from Korea to resolve implementation challenges. This responsive partnership significantly reduced the research and development time required for EDTS.

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Outcomes: Quantitative outcomes that EDTS has achieved

EDTS significantly enhanced their operational agility and cost structure after adopting WhaTap. Highlighting the impact, Jonathan, CTO of EDTS, emphasized two key quantitative achievements:

80% Improvement in Application Response Time

‍The most dramatic improvement was in system performance. Before WhaTap, the average application response time was sluggish, hovering around 1,800 milliseconds. By leveraging WhaTap’s instant root cause analysis to eliminate bottlenecks, EDTS reduced this to under 500 milliseconds. This represents an 80% improvement in speed, directly translating to a smoother customer experience.

Over 30% Reduction in Server Costs

‍Beyond performance, WhaTap became a tool for financial efficiency. By using the detailed analytics to optimize server specifications and eliminate unnecessary resource allocation, EDTS achieved more than 30% in cost savings. This proved that high performance and cost efficiency could coexist with the right monitoring data.

Enhanced Reliability for High-Traffic Events

‍Qualitatively, the stability of client applications improved significantly. By proactively managing traffic spikes during major sales events using WhaTap’s insights, EDTS ensured that their clients’ businesses ran without interruption, leading to higher satisfaction for both the clients and their end-customers.

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Conclusion: EDTS expands partnership with WhaTap across Salim Group

WhaTap has proven to be more than just a monitoring tool for EDTS; it is a strategic asset that ensures business continuity and efficiency. The ability to resolve issues faster and reduce operational costs has delivered immense value.

Recognizing this potential, EDTS has established a partnership with WhaTap to expand its use within the wider Salim Group. As Jonathan stated, "We see significant potential for WhaTap within Salim Group, as many of our companies face similar challenges. We have proven that we can solve problems in a significantly shorter time with WhaTap." Moving forward, EDTS will continue to leverage WhaTap to deliver operational excellence and value to Indonesia's digital ecosystem.