Tictail

An easy way to start an online store

Tictail launched in Sweden in May 2012 with the purpose of helping anyone who had a great product, to easily sell online. The idea is to aid indie brands and retailers to do just that, and in a way that helps build their brand, and makes them proud of their online store. Tictail have created an easy way to start an online store, but also made sure they are beautiful and easy to interact with. Today Tictail is a community with over 35,000 stores from all over the world.

Pingdom provides monitoring with an outside perspective

The idea behind Tictail is to allow anyone to start a free, beautiful and social online store. “Two years ago when we started Tictail, our ambition was to allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to be able to start and grow their online business,” says Siavash Ghorbani, CTO and one of the four founders of Tictail. To stand true to that promise, they wanted Tictail to be free and the ease of use was key.

“When we started building Tictail, we didn’t build it for one store, we built it for thousands of stores, and eventually millions of stores,” says Ghorbani and continues “And in order to build a top-tier service that could scale for that, we needed best in breed monitoring, and Pingdom was a natural choice.”

Much like many other companies and services, Tictail has its internal monitoring solution in place to make sure all systems are go. However, in order to get an outside perspective of the system and services they use Pingdom.

“We’ve developed a lot of services to monitor Tictail from an internal perspective, and all the components that compound Tictail. And having customers in 110 countries we wanted to be able to provide them with the fastest and best service,” says Siavash Ghorbani and adds “And for that, we use Pingdom to monitor how we perform from an outside perspective in many different countries. Not only the way we perceive it, but from the user’s perspective.”

Using Pingdom to optimize new versions

When you launch new features or update to a service, it’s very common to use Pingdom to measure what difference is made in terms of load time for instance. This is something that Tictail makes full use of, “Whenever we deploy new features or updates to Tictail, Pingdom is among services that we immediately go into,” Ghorbani says and continues “And since Pingdom retains so much of a history we can compare it quite far back to make sure that we always make it go faster.”

With the world wide probe network Pingdom provides Tictail is able to detect and act on any changes they spot. “For all you care, your service might behave perfectly well, but at the same time you might have customers in Denver, Amsterdam or Stockholm, experiencing really slow response times or even downtimes,” says Siavash Ghorbani.

Not all downtime is global

The Tictail infrastructure consists of a lot of different components and they use Pingdom to monitor essentially every one of them. There’s the API, the store front, image services, payment services, and a whole lot more.

“For each of those we use Pingdom to make sure that each service responds in a timely manner and that we don’t have any downtime,” Ghorbani points out. And since you can have downtime that is focused on a specific region that’s essentially out of your control, you still want to be aware of it, rather than just ignoring it. “We can always go back into the history of Pingdom and check. Maybe we had a disturbance between our service and their location, and the interesting fact is that not all downtime is global” concludes Siavash Ghorbani.