How Airbrake Got EagleRider’s Show Back on the Road

EagleRider is the leading motorcycle experience company with 150+ locations worldwide, offering One-Way Motorcycle Rentals, Guides and Self-Drive tours, as well as a rental membership program. With EagleRider, motorcyclists have the option to select from a fleet of the world's favorite brands, including Harley-Davidson®, Yamaha®, Honda®, BMW®, and more.

With so many moving parts involved in EagleRider’s Motorcycle Rentals around the globe, keeping their website and application running smoothly requires continuous upkeep and monitoring. We spoke with Jason Castillo, Project Manager at EagleRider, to find out how they use Airbrake Error and Performance Monitoring to monitor their website for errors.

Challenge

For Jason Castillo and his team, Airbrake Error and Performance Monitoring is instrumental within their deployment workflow. Currently, EagleRider’s team builds, tests and merges their QA environment weekly, but manually handles deployments to production (which occur in 2-3 week cycles). Anytime they push a new deployment to production, 1 to 2 lead developers will monitor Airbrake for any major errors, which are referred to as “show stoppers.” Once a show stopper does appear, they quickly work on a patch.

One “show stopping” error occurred recently when an IP Geolocation service that provided localized experiences started failing on their website. This was a big issue for two reasons: 1) it would start impacting customers if they could not patch it quickly enough 2) It had already impacted their Airbrake bill in a big way!

Solution

Luckily, “Airbrake did not hesitate to quickly alert our team and issue a patch to prevent any large-scale loss in revenue.”

This patch resolved the error. The next step: they spoke to Airbrake about their bill. Due to the error, they went well over their normal on-demand error range, resulting in a much higher bill than usual. At Airbrake, we know all about unplanned spikes in errors, which is why we worked with them to reduce their bill.

Result

We’re happy to say that the results were great! For EagleRider, they not only patched the IP Geolocation service, but they were able to replace that service with a more reliable company. They were also fortunate that this “show stopping” error did not have time to impact customers due to how quickly Airbrake alerted them to the issue.

As for the “show stopping” invoice, Airbrake and EagleRider were able to work together to reduce their bill. Since then, Airbrake has even released a new feature based on this case study called Spike Forgiveness. Spike Forgiveness is essentially an insurance policy where if you ever do burst into on-demand usage that significantly exceeds your monthly quota, you’ll be issued credits you can use for future error monitoring.

About Jason

Jason Castillo is a project & product manager professional with over seven years of experience working alongside the technology team for EagleRider. Jason is responsible for leading digital product design and daily developments, and enjoys using his skills to contribute to the company's success. He graduated from Valdosta State University with a degree in Computer Science. Jason enjoys going on family adventures and playing sports in his free time.

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