About the team:

vCard, a mobile payment solution for individual customers, uses the Unified Payments Interface (UPI)- VPA for making payments and has a vCard merchant mobile app solution for the merchants to accept payments through UPI-VPA based payment system.

My team is responsible for the company’s entire technology stack, which includes customer facing vCard application, loan management system and persistent storage systems. vCard and LMS applications manage most of our core business processes, such as registrations, onboarding customers, digital document verification, account and loan management, payouts and collections etc. These applications have a combination of web-based UIs and REST APIs, providing easy integration with mobile apps.

Key challenges we faced:

vCard has been around for nearly 4 years, but since more than an year we have been suffering from unusual issues in our production environment which left our customers frustrated to use the mobile apps. As days passed these issues become more frequent leading to customer dissatisfaction. At this point, we thought the platform needs constant monitoring and handling.

“Finding production defects with root cause on it’s own is awesome. Seagence takes all the pain off my developers shoulders so they concentrate on what matters more i.e. adding new features.”

How Seagence helped you improve your customer experience?

One of our main focus points is keeping the end user experience always at the best levels. As mentioned earlier we thought the platform needed constant monitoring and in that quest we evaluated various tools. As logs did not reveal any insights, I suspected that the issues in my applications were happening due to either caught or swallowed exceptions. The tools we evaluated did not provide these details, then we evaluated Seagence’s Autonomous Defect Detection and Resolution Tool and deployed in production.

With Seagence, we are able to not only record every error and exception thrown by the application, but also we receive alerts with root causue when defects occur in real time.

Coming to the defect effecting our customer experience in vCard since an year, Seagence detected it with root cause within 1 day of its installation. Seagence alerted on multiple defects due to NullPointerExceptions while parsing Apache’s xerces DOM object. The point that these defects were occurring intermittently we easily figured out that the DOM object is not thread safe and we ran into multithreading issue. Also because these NullPointerExceptions were swallowed by application code we couldn’t figure out the root cause for such a long time. Another reason is that this problem never occurred in DEV and QA which were not identical to prod. This defect was only occurring in production under heavy loads.

That’s one of the biggest advantages Seagence offers our team, and one of the biggest eye opener we had – giving us an in-depth look into every error and exception. Thanks to Seagence, along with that major multithreading issue, it found few other critical defects on it’s own. After fixing those defects, we are now able to provide best user experience possible.

“The big difference between Seagence and other solutions is that, other solutions rest debugging on your developers shoulders but Seagence, uncovering all production defects with root cause, eliminates the need for debugging”

How are you integrating Seagence with your daily workflow?

On a daily basis, in the morning, development team reviews the alerts raised by Seagence. It is part of their morning routine now.

Seagence dashboard provides extensive details, in case debugging becomes necessary, giving our engineers a complete analysis of what actually happened.