customer story

Omnifone

“ The fact that API Monitoring has multiple locations across the globe from which you can monitor is very valuable so that we can proactively solve even the most under-the-radar issues. ”

– Chris Knowles, Technology Director

Omnifone Keeps Its Microservices In Tune with Runscope

The leading B2B cloud music platform provider in the world, Omnifone develops, licences, supplies and operates global music services. Omnifone’s MusicStation platform underpins some of the world’s most popular streaming platforms, including Samsung’s Milk Music streaming service, Spotify, SiriusXM and Neil Young’s PonoMusic, allowing partners to play from any connected device, anywhere around the world.
Recently, Omnifone migrated its MusicStation platform from a datacenter architecture entirely to the cloud by relying on microservices, small suites of independently deployable services, that include thousands of RESTful API services. “By transitioning to microservices, we are achieving unrivalled flexibility and the ability to scale nearly infinitely,” says Chris Knowles, Technology Director, MusicStation Platform at Omnifone. “However, one of our biggest challenges was having the infrastructure to monitor and gain visibility into those services from all over the world.”

Sourcing a REST-driven, Robust API Monitoring Solution

The MusicStation platform is the core engineering piece of the business, powering global partnerships, SLAs for partners and end-user experience. “It is imperative to the business that our platform is performing optimally at all times, and if it isn’t, knowing about problems beforehand is vital in determining how to maintain the highest possible service levels for our customers,” says Knowles.
“We weren’t interested in spending the time, money or resources on building out global, scheduled API monitoring infrastructure internally, particularly to the point of scale and complexity that our platform requires.”
Knowles and his team tried other API monitoring and testing services on the market with little sustained success before signing up for a free trial of Runscope. “Other solutions only offered low-level API testing, were difficult to use and maintain or were legacy platforms trying to modernize and weren’t RESTful-API driven,” says Knowles.
”Runscope was the only solution that was modern enough to meet our complex technology needs, simple enough to scale with us and robust enough to use with our thousands of globally distributed APIs.”

Using Runscope to Harmonize Microservices

Knowles got his team up and running with Runscope in no time and began building and scheduling tests within minutes. The MusicStation platform team uses Runscope to monitor hundreds of APIs in its development and production environments. “Each microservice has its own API and set of operations and use cases,” says Knowles. “We have scheduled Runscope acceptance tests set up for each one.”
Omnifone’s microservices fit together to provide unique functionality to partners and end-users. For instance, a service that meters data on songs that customers play or download works in tandem with a service that exposes that data as a list form. Those services together allow end-users to see the music they’ve last consumed.
“It’s critical to our business that all these independent services work together seamlessly,” adds Knowles. “With Runscope, we monitor not only each individual service, but also their cohesive use cases to ensure that the entire system is operating efficiently.”
By monitoring its APIs and leveraging Runscope’s integration with Keen, Omnifone establishes a baseline of global API performance and analyzes that data to pinpoint even the most concealed issue. Omnifone schedules tests that run as often as by the minute to get quick feedback. “Runscope provides the utmost visibility in proactive feedback of traffic running through our APIs from multiple global locations, which contributes to our ability to fix issues fast,” explains Knowles.

Easy Orchestration Across Teams

Since signing on with Runscope, Omnifone’s Engineering team has leveraged API monitoring and testing to gain global insight before launching partners, significantly reducing potential issues and ensuring adherence to strict SLAs. Omnifone’s partners are distributed all over the world, and some partners have unique infrastructure for tailored features.
“The fact that Runscope has multiple locations across the globe from which you can test is very valuable so that we can proactively solve even the most under-the-radar issues,” says Knowles. The team tests unique API integrations from different locations to see how a deployment affects each partner. “With Runscope, the team can solve problems faster and leverage the data to support it.”
The Engineering team also set up an integration with StatusPage.io to provide full transparency to partners. “If an outage occurs, we’re able to use Runscope metrics to automatically pinpoint the specifics and push that to our status pages. We even go as far as showing degraded performance based on Runscope test results,” says Knowles. “With Runscope, we’re able to get full response data and speedy results to our partners and internally.”

Continuing to Automate and Iterate

Since it began using Runscope, Omnifone launched Samsung Milk Music in Australia and New Zealand, and has big plans to continue global expansion. Knowles adds, “Runscope has scaled with us, and there have been no major issues with how much or how quickly we’ve wanted to grow our usage.”
Part of Omnifone’s success has been in its commitment to automation. “The more we automate these processes and integrate them into our development pipeline like we’ve done with Runscope, the more confidence we have that what we’re providing to our partners performs well on a global scale,” says Knowles. “With Runscope worrying about API issues for us, we can focus on maintaining relationships and growing our brand and product.”

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