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"Dynatrace has been revolutionary for Photobox, as our teams are now able to do work that previously would have taken hours in just minutes"
Photobox prides itself on delivering exceptional customer experiences with its market-leading photo printing and gifting service. With no physical stores, the digital customer journey is crucial. The nature of Photobox’s business, however, means it faces the unique challenge of needing to sustain these journeys for hours or even weeks while its customers build their personalized photobooks and gifts via its website and app. These services are powered by a bespoke technology stack and home-grown e-commerce application, built on AWS EC2 and microservices, running on Kubernetes and AWS Lambda. In addition, Photobox operates multiple factories across Europe, which also rely on a custom technology stack.
Monitoring such a diverse technology stack became a significant challenge for Photobox. The company came to rely on ten different monitoring and logging solutions across its stack, and teams had to check each of them manually to understand the end-to-end customer journey. Overseeing so many disparate solutions had become humanly impossible to manage and costly to maintain, delivering little value. To understand an end-to-end flow, an engineer would have to look across five or six different dashboards and manually build out a journey for a particular set of challenges. That required about three or four hours of work to diagnose problems. Photobox wanted an all-in-one monitoring solution that could reduce that to just minutes by providing precise, actionable answers in one place, to help teams make faster, more data-driven decisions to optimize customer experiences.
Photobox sought an intelligent observability platform that could consolidate all monitoring data into a single pane of glass across the company’s end-to-end technology stack. After evaluating the market, Photobox identified Dynatrace as the clear choice, due to its flexibility, comprehensive capabilities, and its ability to quickly identify and solve performance issues. Dynatrace’s availability on AWS Marketplace was a further advantage, enabling Photobox to obtain Dynatrace through its Enterprise Agreement with AWS, which simplified the procurement process and optimized its spend with Amazon.
“In the monitoring space, everyone craves having one place they can look for clear, actionable data, and we just didn’t have that,” said Alex Hibbitt, Engineering Director, SRE & Fulfillment at albelli-Photobox Group. “With such a diverse technology stack, not many solutions were able to meet all our needs, but Dynatrace was the exception. Its flexibility and extensibility enables us to monitor our custom applications with minimal manual effort. Dynatrace’s automatic discovery and instrumentation for AWS Lambda and Kubernetes have also been invaluable, and fulfilled all of our most essential requirements.”
"Dynatrace has been revolutionary for Photobox, as our teams are now able to do work that previously would have taken hours in just minutes."
“Dynatrace has been revolutionary for Photobox, as our teams are now able to do work that previously would have taken hours in just minutes,” Hibbitt continued. “Since Dynatrace has been introduced, we’re able to identify the core pain points in any customer’s journey and focus our engineering effort on resolving those pain points. That’s allowed us to increase our customer experience massively, because Dynatrace is helping us to respond to things faster and in a more automated fashion. Dynatrace is the beating heart of our observability strategy. It supports the idea that observability is a mindset rather than a set of tools or practices, and for us, that’s key to making our customer journey as optimized as possible. In future, we’re looking to extend Dynatrace to more areas of our business, making it the core observability and automation platform for our estate.”
"With such a diverse technology stack, not many solutions were able to meet all our needs, but Dynatrace was the exception."
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