How Locus Decreased Customer-Reported Issues by 95% With Synthetic Monitoring from Checkly

Founded in Bangalore, India, in 2015 by Geet Garg and Nishith Rastogi, Locus has expanded internationally and now boasts close to 300 employees, with offices in India, Indonesia and the United States. To support their impressive growth, Locus relies on a host of the latest platforms and technologies to support their products. They rely on AWS for hosting, use a React-based front-end, a Java backend, and use private GitHub repos for code repositories.  

As the Locus product portfolio expanded, the engineering team was faced with the challenge of tracking down issues with some of their essential APIs and other services. “We were facing a lag and operations were halted at some of the locations, which could have led to revenue losses,” says Aliasger Kiranawala, Lead Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) for Locus. “So we began looking for a monitoring solution that could provide information on how our APIs were performing, and to also proactively provide us an alert or notification when issues were identified, rather than having a customer find that issue and then contact us.”

That’s when Locus engineers explored using Checkly, and found that Checkly’s alerting features, impressive scheduling options, and robust integration options (with platforms and services like Slack, SMS, and more) would help them effectively monitor their APIs and other systems, and alert them immediately—using Checkly alerts via Slack, OpsGenie, and email—when issues were detected.

“We found Checkly’s ability to selectively monitor from different regions to also be useful,” says Kiranawala. For example, we faced an issue where we wanted to—due to GDPR policies—restrict customers from certain IP addresses from hitting certain servers in the European region.”

Locus engineers were able to use Checkly to set up alerts that notified them when a customer was attempting to access a service from the wrong region. Without Checkly, customers would often get locked out of their account as it would be accessed from a blocked region.  

Checkly’s synthetic monitoring helped Locus engineers save valuable time and resources by identifying issues quickly, and make more informed engineering decisions based on the data they were receiving from their Checkly monitoring regimen.

With Checkly synthetic monitoring integrated into their existing workflows, the Locus team can focus better on serving the needs of their customers instead of chasing down false positives and fixing problems after the fact. Kiranawala notes that their usage of Checkly has expanded significantly since the first deployment, effectively increasing their monitoring coverage by 100%.

“We started monitoring a few basic APIs, but now we currently have more than 80 checks running across our engineering organization,” says Kiranawala. “We monitor all important day-to-day endpoints—configured across different stacks—to make sure we get notified immediately if something isn’t working.”
Locus hopes to build what is essentially a new operating system for logistics, and has been expanding aggressively over the last few years. The Locus team also prides themselves on its product’s capabilities, including the proprietary geocoding algorithms and an advanced logistics routing engine. Using Checkly, they can now continuously monitor the technology stack that provides those revolutionary capabilities and catch the vast majority of issues before customers see them.

Those aforementioned product capabilities have also led to a number of recent developments for Locus, including being granted a patent for machine learning models to accurately predict traffic time for better last-mile deliveries and being named a top emerging startup for logistics technology by Tracxn, a global platform for tracking startups and private companies.