Smartfren, Indonesia’s leading mobile carrier with over 39 million subscribers, provides diverse communication solutions, including LTE. As a rapidly growing company, reliable IT operations were critical. However, they faced significant hurdles, including managing complex distributed systems, difficulty detecting failures, limited alerting capabilities, heavy workloads for open-source maintenance, and cost inefficiencies.

To address these issues, the IT Commercial Digital and Service Management team evaluated various global monitoring solutions. Ultimately, they selected WhaTap, as it best met their key requirements.

This article examines Smartfren's main challenges, why they chose WhaTap, and the outcomes achieved since adoption.

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Challenges: The 5 Main Obstacles

Smartfren recognized that efficient, reliable IT operations are key to business success but struggled with technical and performance management issues within their large-scale infrastructure. Five main challenges needed addressing:

1. Lack of Visibility into Complex Distributed Systems

‍Smartfren’s IT ecosystem was complex, involving interactions between servers and applications across various languages and environments. While the operations team used open-source log integration and distributed tracing libraries like Jaeger, applying them consistently across legacy and mixed environments proved difficult.

2. Absence of Comprehensive Monitoring Tools

‍The team relied on resource usage and logs to identify issues, but these methods failed to quickly detect user-facing failures. Significant time and resources were wasted trying to pinpoint unlogged error segments and measure post-incident improvements.

3. Limitations in the Alerting System

‍Their alerting system, based on CPU usage or error logs, struggled to detect failures in real-time. This delay directly impacted the customer experience. The team needed a high-fidelity alerting policy capable of reflecting actual user experiences and detecting failures immediately.

4. Technical Support Burdens

‍Maintaining multiple open-source monitoring tools created operational friction. Frequent tool errors and the need for manual intervention burdened the operators, distracting them from actual troubleshooting.

5. Cost Efficiency

‍While evaluating global services, Smartfren found that most offered rigid packages with unnecessary features, forcing payment for unused tools. They needed a solution that offered both high visibility and cost efficiency.

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Solution: Optimizing IT Operations with WhaTap

After a thorough Proof of Concept (PoC) process comparing various global services, Smartfren chose WhaTap. It met all requirements regarding application visibility, distributed tracing, practical architecture, and technical support.

WhaTap offers deep application visibility across diverse environments. Its powerful distributed tracing feature seamlessly integrates with both legacy systems and modern applications—a crucial capability for Smartfren’s mixed-environment infrastructure.

Furthermore, WhaTap’s intuitive design eliminates unnecessary complexity. It provides comprehensive monitoring—from infrastructure to applications, databases, and logs—without a complicated setup. Additionally, swift and professional on-site technical support significantly reduced the burden on the operations team, solidifying WhaTap as the ideal partner for building a reliable IT environment.

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Outcomes: 3 Key Achievements

Since adopting WhaTap, Smartfren has significantly enhanced its IT operational efficiency, achieving three main outcomes:

1. Secured Visibility over Distributed Systems

‍Smartfren now utilizes distributed tracing for PHP, Golang, and Java applications, as well as their API Gateway. Implementation was seamless; the WhaTap agent was applied across legacy and modern environments without additional libraries. They even integrated a Golang-based commercial API Gateway using WhaTap’s OpenTracing-supported module.

2. Immediate Error Identification and Remediation

‍Previously, error detection and analysis were time-consuming. With WhaTap, the operations team can now instantly detect errors on the dashboard. By simply clicking on error indicators (red dots), the system analyzes resource usage and logs to identify issues that previously went undetected. This has enabled continuous service improvement and enhanced reliability.

3. Reinforced Alerting System

‍Smartfren migrated their resource-based alarms to WhaTap and added Apdex-based alerts. This supports real-time detection of error spikes and response delays. Consequently, the team can now identify and respond to user-impacting issues much faster.

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Conclusion: Driving Efficiency with WhaTap

WhaTap has become a powerful asset for Smartfren, streamlining the operation of their complex IT infrastructure. By reducing the operations team's workload through professional support and robust tools, WhaTap has enhanced system reliability and cost efficiency.

Key Metrics:

• Reliability: Average response time decreased from 2 seconds to 0.8 seconds within 6 months (a 60% reduction). The overall error rate dropped from 2% to 0.2% (a 90% decrease).
• Cost Efficiency: Smartfren established an optimized monitoring environment at 20% of the cost of other commercial tools by utilizing WhaTap’s flexible, feature-focused pricing.

WhaTap continues to collaborate with Smartfren to provide an optimal monitoring environment and maximize operational efficiency.