After shopping at E-Mart, you’ll often pass a parking payment kiosk before exiting the lot. That entire parking infrastructure—hardware, software, and settlement systems—is powered by iParking, Korea’s largest parking management platform. We spoke with CTO Lee Sang-min to learn how iParking develops, operates, and monitors its nationwide parking systems.

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What kind of company is iParking, and what is the CTO’s role?

CTO Lee Sang-min:
iParking is the number one parking technology company in Korea. We develop both hardware and software in-house. While traditional parking companies only install equipment at parking lots, we provide a fully integrated, centrally managed platform.

Our IT infrastructure spans multiple clouds, including AWS and NHN IDC. As CTO, I oversee both hardware and software development organizations and ensure stable, scalable operations across thousands of distributed systems.

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How does the development/operation team use WhaTap?

All Java-based backend developers and infrastructure engineers use WhaTap for everything—from resource-level metrics to application tracing. Essentially, most backend developers actively monitor through WhaTap.

We also have a large monitoring screen displayed in the office, with WhaTap dashboards always visible. When issues occur, we capture the screen and share it across the entire development organization to align on what indicators changed and where the problem originated. This is especially essential for our senior developers.

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Why did iParking choose WhaTap?

I wanted iParking and WhaTap Labs to grow together. To scale globally, WhaTap needs operational experience monitoring very large, distributed systems—and iParking provides exactly that. Our service is built on an MSA (Microservice Architecture), and monitoring thousands of infrastructure components is a major challenge and opportunity.

Another strength of WhaTap is its willingness to reflect customer feedback. When we request technical enhancements, the team does its best to incorporate them or offers clear plans for improvement.

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Which WhaTap features do you use most frequently?

We primarily rely on Application Monitoring, followed by Server Monitoring and Database Monitoring.

As mentioned, our office TV continuously displays WhaTap dashboards. For field operations, we use the integrated dashboard to monitor resources and the integrated matrix board to troubleshoot incidents in real time.

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How has WhaTap helped iParking operate more effectively?

At iParking, opening WhaTap is the first step whenever a problem occurs. Fault detection is critical, and WhaTap alerts arrive across various channels. Since too many alerts can be distracting, we configured only the most essential notifications for application monitoring—this ensures immediate recognition of important issues.

WhaTap is not just a failure notification tool. It helps determine why a failure occurred and what the root cause is.
For example, it allows us to easily identify whether the issue is related to networking, applications, integrations, or the DB layer. This structure has allowed us to detect and resolve numerous issues quickly.

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Would you recommend WhaTap for companies managing large-scale infrastructure?

Absolutely. iParking operates over 4,200 parking lots nationwide, with 10,000+ PCs installed across these sites. Large-scale infrastructure is usually monitored via in-house systems. However, WhaTap is the only SaaS-based monitoring platform in Korea capable of operating at this scale.

We run all resource monitoring for our nationwide parking sites through WhaTap, and having such a large commercial reference validates the reliability of the service.

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Any additional thoughts or requests?

I hope WhaTap expands into marketing, product, and service planning–oriented monitoring.
For example, it would be valuable to visualize the user flow—what screens users visited and in what sequence.

If WhaTap extends its capabilities beyond developer-focused metrics to include customer journey analytics, user behavior patterns, and service funnel insights, it could serve as a company-wide decision-making tool, not just an engineering system.