Ankit Anand

Maintainer, SigNoz

About Bands

Bands is an innovative product aimed at empowering musicians by providing them with an all-in-one toolkit to manage their careers. Founded with the mission to simplify the business side of music, Bands helps artists understand their earnings, track their performance across different platforms, and make data-driven decisions to grow their careers.

Key Features of Bands:

• Financial Aggregation: Integrates with over 50 music royalty platforms, distributors, and publishers to provide a unified view of earnings.
• Data-Driven Insights: Offers analytics on song performance, audience demographics, and revenue streams.
• Ease of Use: Provides a user-friendly mobile application for musicians to access their data anytime, anywhere.

The Challenge: Ensuring Reliability and Observability at Scale

"One of the biggest things for me is being reliable as a service and being able to catch different issues that our musicians and users might run into before they bring it up to us."

— Shiv Ansal, Co-founder & CTO, Bands

As Bands began scaling and onboarding thousands of users, the need for a robust observability solution became critical. The platform integrates with numerous third-party services, including various Digital Service Providers (DSPs) and royalty platforms. This complexity introduced several challenges:

• Monitoring Multiple Integrations: With over 50 different integrations, tracking the success rates and performance of each service was a daunting task.
• Lack of Comprehensive Observability: Initially, Bands used Mixpanel for tracking, which was not suited for backend observability and led to limited insights.
• Manual Monitoring: The engineering team had to manually check systems daily to identify issues, which was time-consuming and inefficient.
• Ensuring Reliability: Providing a seamless and reliable experience for users was paramount, requiring timely detection and resolution of issues before they impacted users.

Chose SigNoz over Datadog for its predictable billing & cost-effective solution

Shiv, Bands’ CTO is an ex-Coinbase engineer. Engineers at Coinbase spent months optimizing the data sent to Datadog, which he saw firsthand. It was a waste of precious engineering bandwidth.

"I used to work at Coinbase actually. At Coinbase, there was a huge effort internally to minimize the Datadog bill. I think we were spending tens of millions of dollars on Datadog at Coinbase."

— Shiv Ansal, Co-founder & CTO, Bands

Datadog’s pricing is complicated and unpredictable and leaves its users wondering whether it’s actually worth it.

Apparently, there was a news about Datadog charging $65M bill to a crypto company which got a lot of attention in the developer ecosystem. Datadog mentioned in its public call that it was a bill that would not recur and that the customer had optimized the bill.

Implementing SigNoz: A Seamless Transition to Better Observability

Discovering SigNoz

In search of a cost-effective and efficient observability tool, Shiv learned about SigNoz through a recommendation from a fellow startup founder. The criteria were clear:

• Affordability: As a startup, controlling costs was essential.
• Ease of Integration: Quick and straightforward setup without significant overhead.
• Comprehensive Features: Needed logs, metrics, and alerting capabilities.

"We didn't want to go with expensive tools. We were able to get almost everything working in one day for one of our services.”

— Shiv Ansal, Co-founder & CTO, Bands**, CTO Bands**

Smooth Integration with Support

• Learning Curve with OpenTelemetry: While there was a slight learning curve with OpenTelemetry, SigNoz's comprehensive documentation and support made the process smoother.
• Responsive Support Team: SigNoz's support, particularly from Srikanth, was instrumental in resolving issues quickly.

"Your support has been great. Srikanth is great. All your support team is really good. That's maybe the best part of SigNoz."

— Shiv Ansal, Co-founder & CTO, Bands

Uncovering Hidden Issues

During the integration, Bands discovered underlying issues in their own services that had previously gone unnoticed.

• Queue Infrastructure Issues: The observability provided by SigNoz exposed bugs in their queue-based systems.
• Improved Code Quality: Identifying and fixing these issues led to better performance and reliability.

"As we were integrating with SigNoz, we were exposing issues within our internal service that we had no idea were happening, and we were able to resolve them."

— Shiv Ansal, Co-founder & CTO, Bands

Key Benefits and Use Cases

Comprehensive Monitoring of Third-Party Integrations

"We needed an efficient way to track the success rates for all integrations. With SigNoz, we send a bunch of metrics like count metrics and latency metrics to understand our error rates for all these third parties."

— Shiv Ansal, Co-founder & CTO, Bands

The engineering team at Bands implemented SigNoz to monitor:

• Success Rate Tracking: Monitoring the success rates of API calls to over 50 third-party providers.
• Latency Metrics: Measuring response times to identify slowdowns or bottlenecks.
• Anomaly Detection: Setting up alerts for unusual patterns or failures.

Automated Alerting and Incident Response

Integrating SigNoz with PagerDuty allowed Bands to receive automated alerts for any issues detected. This facilitated quick acknowledgment and resolution of incidents, reducing the need for manual checks and constant monitoring. The engineering team could now focus on development rather than firefighting, with peace of mind knowing that they would be promptly notified of any critical issues.

Key Features:

• Integration with PagerDuty: Automated alerts for immediate action.
• On-Call Management: Efficient incident acknowledgment and resolution.
• Peace of Mind: Reduced manual monitoring efforts.

Building Dashboards on Logs to Monitor things like Status Codes

"Your log feature is really nice. Forwarding logs and building dashboards on logs is really nice. It's almost like a metric in itself."

— Shiv Ansal, Co-founder & CTO, Bands

Bands could build dashboards based on logs to monitor key indicators, treating logs almost like metrics themselves. Access to logs, metrics, and traces in one unified platform simplified debugging, allowing for a better grasp of what was happening within their services.

• Efficient Log Querying: Fast and easy querying of logs for troubleshooting.
• Dashboard Visualization: Building dashboards based on logs to monitor key indicators.
• Unified View: Access to logs, metrics, and traces in one platform simplifies debugging.

Results: Improved Reliability and Operational Efficiency

By adopting SigNoz, Bands significantly reduced manual effort in monitoring their systems. Automated monitoring replaced the need for daily manual system checks, freeing up the engineers to focus on building new features and improving the product.

Faster issue resolution became possible with immediate alerts, enabling the team to act before users were affected. The observability in place now leads to quicker diagnosis and fixing of issues, enhancing the overall reliability of the platform.

As Bands continues to onboard more users and integrations, SigNoz scales with them effectively. With plans to switch to AWS and further expand services, SigNoz provides a scalable observability solution that prepares them for future growth.

Looking Ahead: Plans for Optimization and Growth

Bands plan to delve deeper into SigNoz's features. They are interested in exploring Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for deeper insights and leveraging SigNoz's anomaly detection features to proactively identify issues.

By adopting SigNoz, Bands has significantly improved its observability and reliability, leading to a better experience for both the engineering team and the musicians who rely on the platform.

With SigNoz, Bands can focus on its mission to empower musicians, knowing that their backend systems are monitored and issues are swiftly addressed.

"SigNoz is easy, simple, and affordable. It's made me very happy. I'm very happy with SigNoz. Now I'm about to go on vacation for a week, and I'm going to sleep beautifully because I know that if something's wrong, I'm going to get paged about it."
— Shiv Ansal, Co-founder & CTO, Bands

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