Rookout expedites Yad2’s development workflow and issue resolution

The Yad2 Debugging Challenge

With a team of over 100 developers working in a cloud-based environment, Yad2 found that resolving production-grade bugs was a significant challenge. Their team predominantly uses NodeJS, works in the cloud with AWS running on Kubernetes.

When resolving issues that popped up – predominantly in production – Yad2’s R&D team relied on tried and tested methods, such as classic debugging and monitoring solutions, QA, and logging. However, sometimes some bugs are harder – or almost impossible – to find in these environments.

Even with processes in place for ensuring that no bugs made it to production in the first place, there was no way to ensure that no production issues occurred.

Relying on classic methods 

Before turning to Rookout, they have realized, like many other companies, that they were struggling with production-grade bugs and couldn’t find the source of it.  Due to the complexity of the microservices their developers worked with, finding the root cause of the issue was proving to be complex, chaotic, and difficult and their developers were unable to follow the flow of the code. 

At the beginning, Yad 2 relied heavily on their QA teams to catch bugs before they were pushed to production. However, as with all code, some bugs got through. As soon as they found an issue in production, they would immediately try to reproduce the issue to fix it. However, without the relevant knowledge of what was happening and where, their developers were flying blind, trying to understand the root cause of the issue. They used to try to reproduce the issue in their dev environments or relied on their logging and monitoring tools to help them figure out what was going on. If that didn’t work, they would rely on rollbacks to help them figure out the issue. While these tools are beneficial in many ways, they simply weren’t giving their developers the necessary troubleshooting capabilities at the velocity they needed.

As Shlomi Otmazgin, CTO at Yad2, said, “Software developers can’t solve something they can’t see with their own eyes. So as soon as there is an issue in production, they need to be able to see the relevant data to get that understanding”. 

The team at Yad 2 understood that they needed a tool that would help their developers access the data they needed to understand what was happening in their code while it was running live in their production environments. This would allow their developers to get to the root cause of the issue quickly without needing to go through lengthy and costly processes.

The Live Debugging Experience

“Rookout solves our production-grade problems,” said Otmazgin. “While we weren’t necessarily on the hunt for a tool like this, we’re happy we took that first demo call. It’s significantly improved our development process and helped us speed up our issue resolution process”.

Otmazgin continued, “When it comes to things that are difficult to debug locally, we no longer have to recreate environments, chase down tickets, or developers in other teams. With Rookout, our developers can simply go into production, place a non-breaking breakpoint where they believe the issue is, and immediately get the data they need.”

With Rookout, they’ve been able to reproduce and locate the bugs that occur in production. Instead of having to rely on rollbacks, they simply fix the issue with Rookout before it ever becomes necessary. Additionally, Rookout has helped Yad2 developers with not only resolving specific issues but fully understanding the flow of the code and what’s happening in their live environments. Instead of spending half a day on issue resolution, Yad2 developers now simply spend minutes on it, saving significant time and effort and ensuring a smoother workflow.

“Rookout is a tool that gives a great ROI – especially when we look at our developers’ working hours. Without Rookout, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack –  you will try a lot of things, add a ton of logs, and it will take you 10x the amount of time to find the source of the issue – and you might not even find the correct data you were looking for by the end of all of that”. 

With Rookout, Yad2 is able to use its developer time more effectively and with less waste. Rookout has helped Yad2 shorten its time to resolution and made its developers happier. Their users can get faster resolution of issues.

About Yad2

ww.yad2.co.il Yad2 is an online leading classifieds marketplace for buying and selling real-estate, vehicles, and second-hand products.
Yad2 is also the mother company of Drushim IL, a leading Job portal.
It was founded in 2005 by Shaun Tel in Tel Aviv, Israel and is now the 4th Israeli site by traffic in Israel.