For people that build, deliver and manage
software in the healthcare industry, application reliability is an absolute
necessity. With patients’ privacy and wellbeing at stake, there is little to no
room for application downtime or other software failures.
Empowered, a subsidiary of Aflac Incorporated,
manages a digital platform that simplifies the process of selecting and
enrolling employees in benefits offerings and dramatically increases sales for
brokers while reducing errors and administrative costs.
Tens of thousands of insurance brokers rely on
the Empowered platform to work with businesses to enroll their employees in
benefits programs – and many of those agents access the platform on a daily
basis.
A few weeks ago, we spoke with Empowered CTO
Bray Jones to find out how they ensure rapid code changes don’t impact their
customers.
1. Maintaining 24/7 Availability
of Mission Critical Apps
For every healthcare organization running
software, downtime means more than brand tarnishment and, likely, lost revenue.
It means that people don’t have access to information vital to their health and
wellbeing. Ensuring 24/7 (or five 9s) availability, then, should be a top
priority for all of us.
OverOps provides optimized software data that
enables quick identification, prevention and resolution of critical software
issues. By analyzing code at runtime, OverOps is able to identify errors that
would otherwise be missed by testing suites, log analyzers and APM tools.
2. Releasing Code Changes Quickly
with Confidence
For Bray at Empowered, rapid code changes are
a big concern. “We are introducing many code changes quickly, and there’s only
so much that you can test. Having a tool that can preemptively diagnose
problems is vital.”
Many companies are struggling with this same
issue. How do you accelerate feature and code delivery without putting your
application’s reliability at risk?
Using recently released CI/CD integrations, IT orgs
can leverage OverOps data in pre-production to identify errors missed by QA and
test automation and automatically block critical issues from being promoted.
This capability is supported by an open-source scoring system that takes into account new or
increasing errors and slowdowns to determine the stability of a release.
3. Overcoming Fear of the Unknown
Over the years, many of the people we’ve
spoken to have expressed a fear of the unknown. Bray shared a similar sentiment
with us, “our greatest fear is often the unknown. We’re constantly thinking
about what we might have missed in testing when we put code into production.”
And we’re sure he won’t be the last.
After all, there’s only so much you can test
for, and the level of foresight required to cover all possible failure cases is
impossible to achieve. Even 100% code coverage doesn’t guarantee success.
Overcoming this fear is about attaining
much-needed, previously unavailable context around “invisible” errors. With
OverOps, uncaught exceptions, swallowed exceptions and unlogged errors are all known errors. OverOps is not only aware
of these events but is able to alert you on the most critical issues as they
occur by deduplicating them and classifying anomalies in real-time.
4. Resolving Issues in Production
Before Customers Notice
“When we came
across OverOps, one of the key features that caught our attention was the
ability to capture and store the complete parameters and variables at the time
of an issue. We had previously relied heavily on application logs, which felt
like a shot in the dark.”
Once the issue of
unknowns is taken care of, OverOps arms teams with the code-level insight
needed to reproduce and resolve even the trickiest issues in test AND
production. This includes the 7 key components of True Root Cause:
- 1. Code Graph
- 2. The Source Code
- 3. Exact Line of Code in Which the Errors Occurred
- 4. Data and Variables
- 5. Log Statements (including debug and trace level in Production)
- 6. System / Environment Variables
- 7. Event Mapping to Specific Applications, Releases, Services, Etc.
5. BONUS: Shifting Left
Many companies are now “shifting left” by
adopting production monitoring practices in earlier stages of the release
cycle. The goal, of course, is to identify issues before they ever reach
production.
Empowered is accomplishing this by creating a
dedicated team of employees tasked with using OverOps to identify and resolve
critical issues before they reach production and impact customers.
Conclusion
These 5 examples of how our customers leverage
our data are just the tip of the iceberg. No matter where your coverage gaps
are – in testing or in production, in issue detection or resolution – OverOps
has a solution for you.
Learn more about how healthcare companies leverage OverOps data
or see for yourself how OverOps can help your
team deploy code changes with confidence.
Medical companies need to keep their apps or websites up and running so that people have access to them at all times when they need them. Situations are different and there are times when help or advice is urgently needed.