KB Healthcare is a digital healthcare platform established in 2021 as a subsidiary of KB Insurance. Its healthcare service platform, “O’CARE,” launched in February of last year, provides personalized health advice, goal management based on user health data, and tailored content recommendations. O’CARE is offered as a B2B healthcare service, and 87.1% of users report using the service at least once per week. WhaTap has played a significant role in enabling stable service operations within just one year.

In particular, KB Healthcare’s adoption of WhaTap is notable for organizations operating in private cloud environments. We met with Byeong-chang Son, Team Lead of the IT Innovation Division’s Platform Team, to learn how KB Healthcare uses WhaTap for monitoring.

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Q. Please tell us about KB Healthcare and your role.

KB Healthcare is a subsidiary of KB Insurance. Our O’CARE platform is currently provided to employees across the KB Financial Group, and we plan to expand into B2B and B2C services as the platform grows. We operate in a fully cloud-based environment—there is no server room or on-premise infrastructure. Within this structure, I lead cloud operations and big data initiatives.

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Q. What does your infrastructure and operations team look like?

We primarily use Microsoft Azure. In addition, we are preparing to launch a medical platform service in early 2023, which is being built on AWS. Our environment consists entirely of cloud-based infrastructure—VMs, storage, and security solutions—with no on-premise components. Our stack includes Apache, JBoss, various middleware solutions, and cloud databases such as RDB, document DB, and NoSQL DB.

For monitoring, we use:

• WhaTap for application and database monitoring
• Splunk for collecting IoT device metrics

Our internal team includes cloud engineers and big data engineers, and we collaborate with external MSP partners as well.

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Q. What led KB Healthcare to choose WhaTap?

When we launched the O’CARE app in February 2022, we encountered several challenges—surges in concurrent users, application errors, and performance bottlenecks. Although Azure provides tools like Application Insights and Azure Monitor, and we used Splunk for IoT device event monitoring, these were not enough to resolve the issues effectively.

We began evaluating APM solutions, including WhaTap and several global offerings. A major concern with overseas solutions was the data storage region—they did not offer a domestic region. WhaTap not only provides a Korea-based region but can also be deployed in private cloud environments, which led us to choose it.

Technical support was another major factor. WhaTap’s engineers provide direct support, and real-time chat-based technical inquiries significantly help our operations. During user events, we also received extensive performance tuning support.

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Q. How has WhaTap helped your operations?

When O’CARE first launched, WhaTap played a large role in improving performance. Today, we receive only high-severity alerts for specific events and issues. These notifications help us analyze problematic queries in detail.

I rely heavily on the Application Monitoring heatmap to identify slow transactions by drilling down into specific problem areas. WhaTap ensures application availability and enables stable service operation.

Through WhaTap DB monitoring, we also discovered design issues in our initial database architecture, which we’ve continued improving.

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Q. Why do you believe monitoring is necessary, and why recommend WhaTap specifically?

Monitoring is essential for maintaining service stability. In the early stages of service launch, performance issues—slow connections or code errors—can immediately lead to user churn. With WhaTap monitoring, we configured alerts to trigger the moment specific events occur.

By using WhaTap, we significantly reduced the time spent identifying issues and were able to focus more on maintaining service stability. At the KB Healthcare office, the WhaTap dashboard is always displayed on a large screen, and our developers and solution managers continuously monitor it.

For organizations like ours that must store data inside a private network due to corporate policy, WhaTap is the ideal choice—it supports cloud-native environments and private-network installations. Another major advantage is that WhaTap offers real-time support and is far more cost-effective than overseas solutions.