Why Indian OTA giant Goibibo goes to Sumo Logic to create a trusted and improved user experience

Goibibo is India’s leading online travel booking brand providing a range of choices for hotels, flights, trains, bus and cars for travelers. Their core value differentiating claim is being the most trusted user experience, be it in terms of quickest search and booking, fastest payments, settlement or refund processes. Through GoStays, their customers enjoy standardised stay experience at certified hotel properties. With industry-first virtual travel booking currency GoCash and travel social network, GoCash+ Rewards, GoIbibo is emerging as a leading choice for new India on the move.

The recent merger of MakeMyTrip and the Ibibo Group created one of the leading travel groups in India, providing a one-stop-shop for all Indian travellers by bringing together a collection of leading consumer travel brands, including MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, and redBus,

A joint entity of MakeMyTrip and the Ibibo group, Goibibo serves over 4 billion searches every day for flight, hotel, train, bus and car bookings by its end users. Goibibo recently introduced a separate platform called ingoMMT for the supply side of the business. The interface enables hotel partners to list and manage their property inventory, pricing, promotions, and other hotel-specific content. The platform aims to deliver consistent and inspirational experiences across the board by enabling hotel partners to distribute their properties through ingoMMT and communicate with the end-users in real time. However, this proved to be extremely challenging to deploy for Goibibo.

The ingoMMT platform gives users the convenience of managing their property listing anytime, from anywhere. It helps them keep track of reservations, update their inventory and interact with their guests spontaneously using the extranet. The platform exposes its REST APIs to hoteliers that allows them to integrate directly via API mode or ChannelMangers.

The challenges of delivering a top-notch user experience

Prior to Sumo Logic, the Goibibo tech team used an assortment of logging mechanisms and infrastructure like Kibana Logs, filesystems, ElasticSearch, and an in-house Filebeat system. The assortment of systems, practices and a siloed approach catalysed three main issues. First, the systems were centralised, and each microservice followed their own logging system. Second, each team had its own debugging approach by using in-house tools or a set of commands. Finally, there was no alarm or monitoring system on the logs, aside from the size of the logs. The quantum of logs generated by the system was also quite substantial. GoIbibo’s Kafka service creates around 13 GB of logs daily, Nginx generates around 20GB, while the Hotels domain search logs create around 40GB at the infrastructure, API and microservice level.

Evaluating a log management, analysis and reporting platform

Looking to create a centralised, uniform and efficient log management system, the tech team evaluated Sumo Logic, Kibana and an in-house logging system also for over a month before finalising Sumo Logic.

“Sumo Logic is centralised in Goibibo, so everyone from Developers to QA to DevOps uses Sumo Logic. Sometimes, product support and product managers also use the solution. Today, we have 55 Sumo certified users, with 75 percent of our Dev community using Sumo Logic, excluding front-end and mobile app developers,” says Om Vikram Thapa, Associate Director - Engineering, Goibibo.

What made Sumo stand out against the competition

“The ease of going live, convenient integration, the ability to deploy simple search queries, intuitive UI for the logs, the dashboard and the monitoring tools stood out for Sumo. Today, we use Sumo Logic for all use cases including logging, debugging, alarming, monitoring, analytical purposes, as a work from home solution, and even as an app template,” says Vaibhav Aggarwal, Senior Manager, IT Operations at Goibibo.

While they use Sumo Logic’s Essentials version, for day-to-day management, Goibibo leverages Sumo Logic’s professional services for tech problem resolution, certification or debugging complex.

“Our biggest success was reducing the turn-around time for the resolution of production issues. It has come down considerably to 33 percent from its legacy of 40 to 60 minutes. This has been reported by our own network operations center (NOC) and Dev teams. Searches are now faster and with the help of the LogReduce feature, the narrowing down of issues has become extremely smooth. We are also going to enable our CI/CD pipeline (Jenkins) with Sumo Logic to capture deployment failures on the fly. Currently, it takes a lot of to and fro to debug and fix issues. With these solutions, we are expecting the root cause analysis to be done within a few minutes,” says Om.

Why Goibibo recommends Sumo Logic

“Sumo Logic does the best management of your logs. The Sumo team makes sure we meet once a month to discuss the progress, enhancements, roadblocks and anything related to Sumo Logic. They’ve also helped us set up an intra-company Sumo Logic Dashboard Hackathon in November 2019. SumoLogic’s Customer Success and Support teams have been exceptional and extremely proactive with their support efforts,” says Prithivi Raaju - Principal DevOps Engineer at Goibibo.

On being asked if he would recommend Sumo Logic to peers, he adds, “Absolutely! Analysing huge log files or handling logs using poor log monitoring tools can drastically reduce productivity. With Sumo Logic, its easy-to-use interface and add-ons free-up our time spent on monitoring, which helps our teams to focus their energies on building the application’s capabilities and not worry about production issues and bugs.”

About Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a secure, cloud-native, machine data analytics service, which delivers real-time, continuous intelligence from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across the entire application lifecycle and stack. More than 2,000 customers around the globe rely on Sumo Logic for the analytics and insights to build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructure.

With Sumo Logic, customers gain a multi-tenant, service-model advantage to accelerate their shift to continuous innovation, increasing competitive advantage, business value and growth. Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic is a privately held company based in Redwood City, Calif. and is backed by Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, DFJ Growth, Franklin Templeton, Greylock Partners, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tiger Global Management.

For more information, visit: www.SumoLogic.com.