We are thrilled to have Flyclops as a customer at Scalyr. I recently chatted with co-owner Dave Martorana to learn more about how they chose Scalyr and how it is helping the engineering team be more effective.
Flyclops was evaluating log management tools when they came across Scalyr in a newsletter. After signing up for a trial, the team was blown away by the speed of the product. Searches went from minutes to seconds, which allowed them to save valuable development time. Using Scalyr has improved their ability to provide support and rapidly resolve issues, which has led to increased player happiness and let the team sleep at night knowing that they had the right tool in place to help them monitor activity on their servers.
About Flyclops
Flyclops is a independent mobile games studio located in Philadelphia, PA, specializing in casual multi-player games, both asynchronous turn-based, and real-time. Flyclops’s games have been played by millions across the globe.
Evaluation Process
When Flyclops was looking for a logging solution, they evaluated several tools. Other tools they were experimenting with made searching logs a painful task. Flyclops had a few things they were looking for in a log management tool, including:
- Ease of logging
- Speed of collection
- Ability to pull metrics out of log data
- Ability to parse custom log formats
- Ability to diagnose issues quickly
Dave Martorana, co-owner of Flyclops, discovered Scalyr via a Google Go newsletter as a featured log management tool. Given that a lot of the Flyclops backend was written in Go, they decided to give it a try.
Results of using Scalyr
When the Flyclops team started using Scalyr, they immediately took notice of the speed and performance of the tool. Searches went from tens of seconds and minutes in other tools to almost instantaneous with Scalyr.
According to Dave,
“Scalyr has been the single best tool I’ve added to our stack in years”.
Flyclops has 500,000 unique players per month. By using Scalyr, they are able to save significant time investigating issues, which gives more time for development. Scalyr allowed them to diagnose most problems substantially faster than with other tools they had tried. They were able to replace whole suites of monitoring tools with something that can answer questions they don’t know they’re going to have in the future.
The team liked that they had the ability to write their own parsers and didn’t have to conform to a certain pattern when writing data to logs. On the client side of things, they’ve gone through a number of third party crash reporting tools. They started logging client exceptions and wrote some custom parsers in order to parse thru the stack traces and proactively look at what’s unique to their products. They were able to turn Scalyr into the best stack analysis tool they had used.
The team sleeps a lot better knowing that Scalyr is watching their servers. The ability to answer questions they didn’t anticipate allows them to be more proactive. They are able to define custom variables and query them. When launching a new feature with a staged rollout, they are able to use Scalyr to validate that they are rolling out at the speed they expected with just a little bit of graphing. All of this allows them to better support their players, and be sure their customers are having a high-quality experience at all times.
