KB Healthcare is a digital healthcare platform established in 2021 as a subsidiary of KB Insurance. In February last year, the company launched O'CARE, a healthcare service platform that provides advice, goal management, and user content recommendations based on user health data.
O'CARE provides healthcare services to B2B customers, and 87.1% of the respondents who use the service use it at least once a week. WhaTap's help was instrumental in the stable operation of the service that took less than a year.
KB Healthcare's use of WhaTap for monitoring services is of interest to those operating in a private cloud environment. We spoke with Byung-chang Son, head of the Platform Team at KB Healthcare's IT Innovation Center, to learn more about their utilization of WhaTap.
KB Healthcare has restrictions on sending data overseas due to corporate policy. We chose WhaTap because it not only provides a domestic region, but it can also be installed in a private cloud.
- Byungchang Son, Platform Team Leader, KB Healthcare IT Innovation Center
What is KB Healthcare and what does your team do?
KB Healthcare is a subsidiary of KB Insurance. Our healthcare service platform, O'CARE, currently provides services to KB Financial employees. In the future, we plan to expand our services to include B2B and B2C offerings.
We operate in an all-cloud environment, devoid of a physical server room or on-premise equipment. Within the team, I am responsible for overseeing cloud operations and managing big data.
What is KB Healthcare's infrastructure and staffing structure?
At present, we utilize Microsoft's Azure cloud, and we have upcoming plans to launch a medical platform service in early 2023, built on AWS. Our infrastructure does not include any on-premise equipment, as we manage virtual machines, storage, and security solutions within our all-cloud environment.
This infrastructure incorporates technologies such as Apache, JAVOS, middleware solutions, as well as cloud-based databases including RDB, document DB, and NoSQL DB. We rely on WhaTap for application and database monitoring, and Splunk for collecting IoT device metrics.
Our headquarters comprises cloud engineers, big data engineers, and external MSP partners who contribute to our operations.
What led KB Healthcare to choose WhaTap as their monitoring solution?
When we first launched the Ocare App Service, our customized healthcare platform, in February 2022, we encountered numerous challenges related to concurrent events, application errors, and performance.
Despite utilizing solutions like application insights and Azure Monitora within the Azure cloud platform, resolving these issues proved to be difficult. We also used Splunk to collect and monitor metrics and events from healthcare IoT devices, but it didn't fully address our needs.
To address these ongoing issues, we decided to explore the implementation of an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution. An outsourced developer recommended WhaTap and several other external solutions for evaluation.
During the evaluation process, one critical factor we considered was the data storage region. WhaTap stood out because it not only offered domestic regions but also allowed installation in a private cloud, providing the necessary flexibility for our requirements.
Can you tell us a little bit about how WhaTap Monitoring has helped you?
First of all, when we first launched Ocare, we made a lot of performance improvements. Nowadays, we have set up alert notifications so that we only receive risk-level notifications when certain events and issues occur. The alerts allow us to analyze the queries with errors in detail.
In particular, I use the hittmap panel of WhaTap Application Monitoring to drill down and analyze the transactions with slow response time, and I receive alert notifications. With WhaTap Application Monitoring, we have been able to ensure the availability of our service applications and run stable services.
Additionally, we found that the initial database design was incorrect through WhaTap Database Monitoring and are still improving it.
Why do you think it's important to use monitoring, and why do you recommend WhaTap in particular?
I believe monitoring is crucial for ensuring service reliability. Especially during the initial stages of a service launch, addressing performance issues such as connection delays and code errors promptly is essential to prevent user dissatisfaction and attrition. With WhaTap IT monitoring, we were able to configure it to promptly detect and respond to specific events.
At KB Healthcare, we have the WhaTap dashboard constantly displayed on a large monitor in our office, and both our developers and solution providers actively utilize it.
For companies with a policy requiring data to be stored internally, WhaTap is an ideal choice as it offers cloud-native monitoring that can be installed on the internal network. Additionally, the real-time query capability and cost-effectiveness compared to external solutions are notable strengths of WhaTap.