Gengo

People-powered translation in one click

Gengo’s mission is for everyone to be able to read and publish across languages, with one click. Their simple online order form and integrations with YouTube, Zendesk and more make translating easier than ever. With over 11,000 pre-tested translators worldwide, Gengo delivers human quality translation at machine-like speed.

With a global network comes the need for global monitoring

Gengo use a variety of services to monitor their infrastructure, including Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, Chartbeat and custom monitoring scripts. “The main issue with JavaScript-embedded analytics code is that for some measurements there are too many other variables, which can make data misleading,” says Matthew Romaine, the CTO at Gengo.

The company has translators all around the globe, in every time zone. Some were reporting slow page loads or other infrastructure issues that were difficult to verify. “Pingdom’s global network now allows us to monitor differences in response times and potential issues by region, giving our users better transparency into our service status,” says Romaine.

Some web pages are strong indicators of system status and stability as they are the most visited by translators looking to pick up translation jobs. “Our team is very focused on providing speed at key points in the user experience,” says Romaine. “Since we were already using Pingdom’s basic status page, we decided to implement the ping time and status checking for key user pages behind logins.”

The process was quite simple, since Pingdom’s check editor supports a range of methods to get through an authorization step, from basic auth to custom ports, page content, POST data, and Request headers. “We decided which pages to monitor and configured the custom settings to reach specific pages,” says Romaine.

Better performance leads to more satisfied users

Gengo has over 11,000 translators around the world who actively grab and translate jobs. Every translator has a dashboard listing the jobs available for translation, making the dashboard page very important. A functioning page is a must: if translators can’t do their jobs, customers are negatively impacted as well. Additionally, the faster the page loads, the sooner translators can claim a job, so page load time is also very important.

This means that Gengo need to take full advantage of the alerting available. “We use everything—SMS, Twitter, email—especially when systems are not responding. These alerts are sent to core DevOps team members, who review an action plan and any necessary scheduling on a regular basis,” says Romaine.

The public reports are also important for transparency. “We use the public status pages, customized with Gengo branding. They’re available publicly for users to see how our infrastructure is doing. More detailed reports are shared internally with management and the DevOps team for systems analysis on a regular basis as well.”

“By making operations more visible, DevOps are incentivized to address issues earlier instead of letting them fester, which leads to better uptime and happier users,” says Romaine.

“We’re a fast-moving startup that cannot exist without a fully functioning, scalable, stable infrastructure at a reasonable price. Pingdom gives us the right combination of flexibility, ease of use and affordability,” concludes Romaine.