All-in-one education solution, touch class

With the rapid spread and prolonged impact of COVID-19 since late 2019, many educational institutions and companies began adopting non–face-to-face education systems. As a result, the demand for high-quality online education services increased significantly.

Newin is a domestic integrated e-learning solution provider that launched TouchClass in 2015. TouchClass is an e-learning SaaS platform that allows anyone to easily create and deliver training content using elements such as text, images, and quizzes.

We spoke with COO Kim Aron (hereafter Aron), Infrastructure Engineer Moon Hyung-hwan (hereafter Hyung-hwan), and Developer Kim Sung-chul (hereafter Sung-chul) about why they selected WhaTap at the early stage of their service launch and how they operate their services using WhaTap.

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Introduction: Company Overview and Infrastructure

Q. Please introduce Newin and your organizational structure.
Aron: Newin provides enterprise training solutions, and we currently have more than 11 developers. TouchClass is an enterprise education platform offered as a B2B SaaS. It is an all-in-one e-learning solution that enables quick content creation, training delivery, and learning analytics—based on the format, purpose, and needs of each content type.

For example, companies can easily distribute mandatory yearly training videos—such as sexual harassment prevention training or business etiquette courses—and analyze how much of each video employees have watched.

Q. How is Newin’s development environment and infrastructure organized?‍Hyung-hwan: We operate our infrastructure on AWS. Our development languages are Java and PHP, and we currently use WhaTap’s application monitoring only for the PHP services.

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Challenge: Choosing WhaTap and Early Monitoring Use

Q. What led you to choose WhaTap, and how did you learn about it?
Hyung-hwan: Since we needed to respond immediately when issues occurred in the production environment, we compared all available SaaS and on-premise monitoring solutions. After evaluating them, we decided to introduce WhaTap.

Sung-chul: As a small business, we launched new services quickly, but we were not fully prepared to deliver a stable service experience. After receiving customer feedback during the initial launch, we decided to adopt WhaTap monitoring.

Q. What advantages does WhaTap offer compared to previous monitoring tools?
Hyung-hwan: Before using WhaTap, I had used several different monitoring solutions. Since our company must maintain various certifications—including ISMS—monitoring is a mandatory requirement. Initially, we tested an on-premise monitoring tool.

After that, we tested every major cloud-based SaaS monitoring service. What I realized was that each service has its own style, but from the perspective of an actual user, WhaTap stands out. When an issue occurs, WhaTap makes it simple and intuitive to check what happened and where.

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How WhaTap Improved the Service

Q. How has WhaTap helped improve your service?
Sung-chul: During our annual Newin workshop, each team presents their results and plans. Some teams consistently struggled with issues during this workshop period, but after adopting WhaTap, those issues were significantly reduced.

Another example: I detected slow behavior in the DBMS but could not determine the cause—it did not show up as a slow query. When I checked through WhaTap, I discovered an N+1 query pattern and was able to fix it. Although it did not appear as a slow query in traditional logs, WhaTap made it visible.

Lastly, as I joined the middle of a project, I didn’t fully understand the architecture. When failures occurred, I didn’t know where to investigate. Developers can often identify load patterns intuitively, but for me, it required checking everything manually. The execution logs and application monitoring in WhaTap made this process much easier.

Q. Which screens or features do you use most in application monitoring?
Hyung-hwan: Heatmaps and transaction traces are the screens we check most frequently.

Q. How has WhaTap helped during actual operations?
Sung-chul: Before introducing WhaTap, service delays occurred when launching new services, and we received many customer inquiries—almost 100 per event. Now, that number has dropped by about 98%, down to only one or two inquiries. Since adopting WhaTap, service performance has improved greatly, and we continue monitoring and optimizing.

Hyung-hwan: I frequently use WhaTap together with AWS services. Previously, when a problem occurred, I had to manually reproduce the scenario to identify the cause. Now, WhaTap allows me to see whether the issue is in the code, infrastructure, or elsewhere—without reproduction.

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Insights: Why Monitoring Is Essential for Companies Launching New Services

Q. Why should companies use monitoring, and why do you especially recommend WhaTap?
Hyung-hwan: ISMS certification requires the use of monitoring tools—services like Amazon CloudWatch are included in that category. However, the reason we specifically chose WhaTap is because we believed it was necessary to monitor the code written by developers, not just infrastructure-level metrics.

To truly understand service stability and performance, WhaTap’s application-level monitoring is essential.