Life360 uses mobile technology to keep families connected and protected. It is a platform that brings families closer together by helping them better sync, communicate with and protect the people they care about most. Millions of families in over 140 countries rely on the valued core offerings of Life360 including advanced location sharing, location history, driver monitoring, Crash Detection with emergency response, 24/7 roadside assistance and help alerts.
Life360 was drawn to Scalyr for its ease of use, fast search response time, straightforward, and cost-effective pricing model with unlimited users. They know that Scalyr has the ability to scale with their business, without affecting ingestion or search performance. Deployment was easy, utilizing an existing Chef infrastructure to deploy the Scalyr Agent to their hundreds of EC2 servers, and also leveraging the Scalyr Kubernetes Agent daemonset for their Kubernetes clusters.
“Speed of deployment was key”, said Chris Robertson, Head of Cloud Operations. “With a minimum of effort we were collecting logs from our production servers, and seeing consistent performance from Scalyr.”
Life360 also leverages server-side discard filters to ensure they are only retaining data that is useful to them.
“Being able to filter ingestion at the cloud level makes it very easy to control. We discard our most verbose logs by default, and when a situation arises where we need to dive into the details, we can enable those logs in the Scalyr UI,” Robertson said.
One unexpected use case they uncovered is spotting attempted break-ins. By looking at the IP facet for their access logs, Scalyr shows the most prevalent IP’s, making it easy to spot addresses with usually high traffic.
Looking ahead, the team intends to rely more heavily on Terraform for managing their infrastructure. Robertson envisions a skeleton which includes a baseline of code and configuration for Scalyr and their other utilities. This will make it much easier to spin up a new microservice and also ensure consistent adoption of tools. Scalyr’s use of JSON configuration files and its REST API will integrate nicely with this setup.
“My priority is making my team as productive as possible, and Scalyr has delivered on that, both for our operations and development teams,” Robertson said.
