How BigPicture is using Moesif: Monitoring APIs on AWS Lambda

Overview

BigPicture is a marketing analytics platform used by B2B companies like YugaByte that turns anonymous traffic into opportunities. Unlike companies like Mixpanel or popular CRMs, BigPicture is focused on tracking anonymous traffic rather than authenticated users that can be tracked by an email. Their customers install a small javascript snippet on their website. That script is powered by a custom RESTful API that BigPicture built in house on top of AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway with Node.js.

Problem

BigPicture also had some unique challenges by using AWS Lambda. API reliability is critical for BigPicture since if the API is down, BigPicture’s customer data may be lost or not tracked. At the same time, traditional infrastructure level monoitoring is not compatible with a FaaS set up like AWS Lambda. Thus BigPicture added the Moesif Express NPM directly to their AWS Lambda code.

Results

Once installed, Moesif was able to analyze the API traffic and build a historical model. They configured alert rules so the receive Slack and email alerts when Moesif detects anomalous behavior with the API. They uses Moesif not just for monitoring their API, but also getting business metrics to understand which customers are using their API by adding user metadata like email. BigPicture was able to reduce the time to resolution when a new customer is having trouble with their SDK, by searching for the customer's email right in Moesif to bring a full time lime trace of the API calls. With Moesif, BigPicture also sees the browser type and the version of SDK to see if the issue is already known.