Guild Education

Introduction

88 million working adults need upskilling or reskilling to compete in the future of work. Guild's mission is to unlock opportunity for America’s workforce through education, with a double-bottom line business model that does well by doing good.

Guild Needed a Customer-Facing Perspective

Guild runs a variety of educational experiences, which require round the clock connectivity. “We did, and do, have other monitoring solutions,” says Quentin Hartman, director of DevOps and Engineering for Guild Education. “Fundamentally though, none of them looked at our sites from the outside as a user would see them, and we thought it was important to add that perspective to our monitoring regime.”

In evaluating monitoring solutions, Guild’s requirements were as follows:

• Improve visibility into the availability and performance of applications
• Monitor site uptime externally
• Capture metrics related to the user experience to ensure improved performance
• Flexibility in test definitions

Seeking a robust and affordable solution, Guild Education partnered with Uptime.com.

Reliability and Intuitive Setup Were Critical for Guild Education

Guild primarily chose Uptime.com for the breadth of testing options and definitions. “Our teams were able to quickly and easily create tests for a variety of services we rely on to do business, and be sure that the tests accurately reflected our status from the perspective of the Internet at large” said Quentin Hartman.

Guild manages login portals for each educational program offered to its users. Using Uptime.com Transaction checks , Guild can monitor the status of login, dashboard interactions, and user interface elements from a single check.

“Uptime.com provides an important correlation point in conjunction with our other monitoring tools so we can more easily tell if a problem exists within our infrastructure, or if there is a problem somewhere else that might be affecting reachability.”

Testing and Alerting are Much More Efficient

The Uptime.com transaction check tool provides advanced testing and automation with a much lower barrier for entry. As a result, Guild is able to construct a variety of tests with a high degree of detail and sophistication.

“One of the circumstances that contributed to the adoption of Uptime.com was a case where a critical client was contacting us about their portal being unreachable, which was confusing to us because our internal checks all showed green. Turns out the problem was with changes that were being made on their side by mistake. With the help of Uptime.com, and configuring a more sophisticated check, we were able to detect the problem first, putting us into a much stronger position to support our client.”

Utilizing both VictorOps and Slack , Guild is able to receive notifications where staff lives. Consequently, the team has seen an improvement in overall visibility with greater technical detail available.

“We had a routine maintenance that involved running a script, which seemed reasonable and fine to run after testing, in order to automate some changes in production. Well, it was not fine! Turns out it was far too aggressive in the production environment and it was causing timeouts on the site. Uptime.com was the first tool to alert us to the problem, and within moments we were able to stop the script and restore service.” -Quentin Hartman, Director of DevOps and Engineering for Guild Education