Sematext

Fenom Digital is a digital transformation agency that leverages the deep expertise of our curated team of specialists to deliver transformative end-to-end customer experiences, architected with comprehensive (cohesive) solutions designed for speed today, and growth and scalability tomorrow.

Their collaborative approach with a proven milestone–driven methodology enables the right solutions to deliver the right capabilities at the right speed in the market for you and your customers.

As the Salesforce up-and-coming partner of the year, they have extensive expertise and experience within the Salesforce ecosystem.

What were your team's DevOps challenges and pain points prior to using Sematext?

Having worked with similar products for over a decade, our main challenge was finding an automated monitoring solution that instilled confidence that e-commerce websites were not only online, but critical functionality was working as well. We were looking for a more comprehensive and reliable toolset than what we have worked with in the past. With Sematext Synthetics combined with Puppeteer scripts, we can test a website end-to-end from product pages all the way through checkout. With this solution, we know that everything from payment, tax and shipping is functioning as intended.

What were your requirements and considerations for monitoring and/or logging solutions?

• Ability to validate far more than an HTTP response or basic check on the page
• At least 30 days of data retention available
• Transparent pricing that proactively notifies you when spend will increase
• A solution that can scale at the pace of our business growth
• Integrations with key applications like Opsgenie, Slack and MS Teams
• Key performance metrics similar to what you would see from a manual run of Google's PageSpeed Insights tool

Why did you choose Sematext?

Sematext provided the perfect balance of full-featured functionality combined with transparent pricing. While we only currently utilize Synthetics, it has many other features we may bring onboard in the future like Experiences for real-user monitoring.

What problems does Sematext solve for you?

In addition to the end-to-end testing mentioned earlier with Synthetics and Puppeteer, Sematext also includes Web Vitals with Synthetics that can track and show deviations to key indicators like Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). These can be viewed on a regular basis to identify if website changes have inadvertently affected performance.

Please share some insights into your implementation process and transition to Sematext

The transition to Sematext was smooth, as the previous monitoring solution really was only able to check for a HTTP 200 response and whether certain text was on the page.

For implementation and our specific needs, only a basic knowledge of Puppeteer was required to get the Browser checks running. Sematext also provides examples and world-class support if assistance is required.

What was the outcome and product feature(s) do you find most helpful?

The outcome was 24/7 functionality, now feeling confident that e-commerce specific services on our websites are functioning 100% of the time and alerting us immediately if there is any interruption in service.

The most helpful feature after the previously mentioned integration with Puppeteer would have to be the granularity of the data received from each Synthetics browser check. For instance, when a check is experiencing issues, screenshots are recorded, and a waterfall produced. This way we can quickly see if there is a bottleneck with a certain 3rd party script or other functionality.

Anything else you would like to add?

The Sematext support team has been amazing to work with each day. Extremely fast responses to questions, frequent additions of new features as well!