How Middleware Helped Trademarkia Reduce Time to Resolution by 20%

With Middleware's full-stack cloud observability platform, Trademarkia experienced faster issue resolution along with enhanced developer productivity and collaboration.

Challenges with Legacy Infrastructure

Founded in 2009, Trademarkia is one of the largest visual search engines dedicated to trademarked logos, names, and slogans, boasting an extensive database with millions of trademarks. With a global clientele exceeding 120,000, the company offers a range of legal tech solutions for trademark searches, filings, monitoring, and legal automation.

After nearly two decades of leading the sector, Trademarkia envisioned modernizing its IT infrastructure to improve efficiency, scalability, security, and compliance. However, their outdated tech stack was a hindrance to this project.

To tackle this issue, the development team at Trademarkia decided to take a step-by-step approach to modernization, starting by moving away from .NET Core to microservices. This transformation necessitated an observability solution to monitor logs, trace issues, and enhance overall system performance. More specifically, the company required real-time log monitoring capabilities for developers where logs could be viewed instantly as they were generated without having to wait for predefined time intervals.

Seeking the Right Observability Solution

Much like any company venturing into observability, Trademarkia dabbled around with a couple of platforms, which included behemoths like DataDog. However, the outcome was far from perfect. As per Akshat Gupta, Manager of Engineering Operations at Trademarkia, DataDog possessed a certain degree of rigidity due to its complex interface and overwhelming features and lacked real-time log monitoring capabilities.

After several attempts to make the most of what was available, Akshat and his team sought a more user-friendly alternative that integrated with their Kubernetes environment, leading them to choose Middleware’s full-stack cloud observability platform.

Realizing Effective Observability with Middleware

Right off the bat, Trademarkia was able to easily deploy Middleware, thanks to its single script installation. As per Akshat, the platform checked all the right boxes: a simplified interface, real-time log monitoring capabilities, and easy integration with Kubernetes. Moreover, he praised the Middleware's simplicity, proactive alerts, and capability to link frontend and backend traces, which enhanced his team's productivity and efficiency.

For better context, developers typically spend nearly 50% of their time debugging issues. With Middleware, Trademarkia was able to speed up issue detection and resolution by nearly 20%.

With Middleware's real-time log monitoring capabilities, Trademarkia was able to identify suspicious activities, such as unusual spikes in traffic or unauthorized access attempts. The platform's alerting features allowed developers to set up alerts for specific security-related events, such as a sudden increase in API requests or anomalies in user behavior.

Akshat also pointed out that Middleware's integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped his team track IP addresses, analyze traffic patterns, and block malicious traffic. He was also able to analyze request payloads that helped identify and address potential injection attacks, like SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).

Furthermore, Akshat appreciated Middleware’s integration with Slack. The personalized alerts on Slack provided a seamless communication channel for the Trademarkia team, enhancing their overall experience and response time. This ability, combined with Middleware's user-friendly nature, improved collaboration among developers.

After observing the tangible results of deploying Middleware, the team at Trademarkia aims to broaden their observability scope, exploring more features like synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring. It’s only a matter of time before they experience the full potential of Middleware across their IT ecosystem.