Ankit Anand

Maintainer, SigNoz

About Mailmodo

Mailmodo is a rapidly scaling email marketing platform backed by YCombinator that empowers businesses to create and send interactive AMP emails. By embedding forms, surveys, and widgets directly within emails, Mailmodo enhances engagement rates and streamlines the customer journey. Serving high-profile clients in critical email campaigns, Mailmodo processes billions of emails daily, necessitating robust log management and observability.

We sat down with Avneesh Kumar, VP of Engineering at Mailmodo to discuss the team’s experience with SigNoz.

The Challenge: Managing High-Volume Logs and Enhancing Developer Productivity

As Mailmodo transitioned from a monolithic application to a microservices architecture with over 200 services, the complexity and volume of logs increased exponentially.

"We produce on a daily basis almost 200 GB of logs, and during peak times, it can reach up to 500-600 GB. Managing such a massive volume of logs became a significant challenge for us."

— Avneesh Kumar, VP of Engineering, Mailmodo

Key challenges included:

• High Log Volume and Costs: Existing solutions like Azure Application Insights were effective but became prohibitively expensive at scale.
• Inefficient Troubleshooting: Developers spent significant time assisting customer support with log-related queries, impacting productivity.
• Regulatory Compliance: As a SOC 2-compliant company, Mailmodo needed to control access to logs while enabling necessary teams to perform their duties.
• Lack of Centralized Log Access for Support Teams: Customer support relied on developers to access logs, leading to delays in resolving customer issues.

Implementing SigNoz for Centralized Log Management

Mailmodo chose SigNoz as its centralized logging platform due to its seamless integration with its existing tech stack, ability to handle the ingestion of high log volumes, and cost-effectiveness at scale.

Discovering SigNoz Through Open Source Solutions

"We were already using ClickHouse as our OLAP solution. We realized any company that uses ClickHouse can compress logs and enable faster search. That's when we came across SigNoz."

— Avneesh Kumar

After evaluating other solutions like Loki and BetterStack, Mailmodo found SigNoz to be the most suitable for their logging needs.

As an advocate for open-source solutions, Avneesh loved the fact that SigNoz is open-source and

"The best thing about SigNoz is that it's open source. I can go into the source code and look at what's happening. That's a great confidence booster for long-term usage."

— Avneesh Kumar

Seamless Integration and Responsive Support

• Easy Onboarding: With OpenTelemetry support, Mailmodo integrated SigNoz without significant changes to their codebase.
• Structured Logging: The development team standardized log formats across services, enhancing searchability and analysis.
• Responsive Assistance: SigNoz's support team provided prompt help during integration, ensuring a smooth transition.

Once the Mailmodo team integrated SigNoz for logs monitoring, the team saw significant improvements in troubleshooting speed.

"The ingestion rates and search speeds with SigNoz have significantly improved our troubleshooting speed."

— Avneesh Kumar

Using SigNoz for Effective Log Management

Empowering Customer Success Teams

By providing controlled access to SigNoz dashboards, Mailmodo enabled their technical support team to handle customer queries independently.

• Independent Troubleshooting: Support teams can search logs by customer ID, user ID, or time frames without developer assistance.
• Improved Response Times: Faster resolution of customer issues enhances customer satisfaction.
• Regulatory Compliance: Access controls ensure that only authorized personnel view sensitive logs.

"Our most prominent use case was to give access to logs to the customer support team. Now that dependency has completely been removed from the tech team."

— Avneesh Kumar

Creating Parameterized Dashboards for Insights

Mailmodo leveraged SigNoz's parameterized dashboards to monitor logs across different environments and services.

"We have created parameterized dashboards using SigNoz. In a single dashboard, we can monitor all logs and plot intuitive graphs to see what's happening."

— Avneesh Kumar

Having parametrized dashboards helped the Mailmodo engineering team quickly monitor logs across environments and other resource attributes.

• Environment-Specific Views: Dashboards display logs for debug, UAT, and production environments.
• Service-Level Monitoring: Developers and support teams can select specific services and container apps to view relevant logs and metrics.
• Severity Filtering: Visualizing logs by severity levels (info, warning, error) helps in quick issue identification.

Using SigNoz as the first line of Defence to troubleshoot issues

Mailmodo utilizes SigNoz's alerting capabilities to monitor log patterns and receive notifications on critical issues.

• Aggregated Alerts: Grouping similar errors reduces noise and highlights significant issues.
• Third-Party Integration Monitoring: Alerts notify the team when integrations fail due to issues like expired API keys or endpoint failures.
• Timely Interventions: Developers can act swiftly on alerts to resolve issues before they impact customers.

"We are setting up alerts so as soon as the number of errors spikes, we get notified. This helps us maintain service reliability."

— Avneesh Kumar

Enhancing Developer Productivity

By shifting log access to the technical support team, the Mailmodo team was able to save 6 hours of precious developer time on an average daily.

"We have started saving almost six hours on a daily basis, which we can now invest in other tech debts and backlogs."

— Avneesh Kumar

Using SigNoz for logs led to:

• Time Savings: Approximately 6 hours saved daily as developers no longer handle routine log inquiries.
• Focus on Development: Developers can dedicate time to improving the product and addressing technical debt.

Results: Improved Log Management and Operational Efficiency

Cost-Effective Log Handling

• Reduced Operational Costs: Switching to SigNoz reduced reliance on expensive solutions like Azure Application Insights.
• Efficient High-Volume Log Processing: SigNoz handled Mailmodo's large log volumes effectively without performance degradation.

Empowered Teams and Faster Issue Resolution

• Empowered Customer Success team: The internal technical support team and customer-facing teams are now empowered with log access to help resolve customer issues.
• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Faster troubleshooting leads to improved customer experiences.
• Developer Satisfaction: Reduced interruptions allow developers to focus on innovation and product enhancements.

"SigNoz has been a great help. The entire experience has been very smooth, and the support we receive is prompt and effective."

— Avneesh Kumar

Conclusion

Mailmodo plans to consider SigNoz for other observability needs, such as APM and tracing, especially as they contemplate moving to Kubernetes.

"If we move to Kubernetes, SigNoz's OpenTelemetry support would make it easy to take care of observability."

— Avneesh Kumar

By implementing SigNoz for log management, Mailmodo has significantly improved operational efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced developer productivity. The ability to handle high log volumes and empower support teams has transformed their approach to observability.

"SigNoz has not only provided a scalable, cost-effective solution but also transformed our support operations by empowering our technical support team to handle logs independently."

— Avneesh Kumar

With SigNoz, Mailmodo can continue to scale confidently, ensuring reliable service delivery and superior customer support while keeping operational overhead low.

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