Real-time Google Cloud Platform monitoring drives Dave’s DevOps and security success

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  Challenge

  Most known for Dave the bear and their slogan “Banking for Humans,” Dave is a fintech company on a mission to make banking friendly and approachable. Rolled out in 2017, Dave initially focused on addressing specific pain points consumers face from big banks and legacy banking products. They provided an alternative that did away with overdraft fees and bridged consumer financial needs through services like early direct deposit, no-fee cash advances, and their Side Hustle feature, which helps people find extra income. By delivering on what customers need and want, Dave, has grown their membership base to 10 million-plus users through their mobile app. Since launching its more comprehensive suite of financial services under Dave Banking in December 2020, Dave products are continuing to improve the financial health of its members.

  Built 100% on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Dave’s engineering philosophy anchors on keeping things simple. Implementing continuous delivery, their operations, security, and infrastructure teams work in lockstep to build and iterate products. Their backend is developed with Typescript and MySQL, and their mobile app is developed using React.js and React Native.

  Dave is experiencing hypergrowth, which opens a slew of complex but welcome challenges. In 2020, Chien-Liang Chou joined the company as the Executive Vice President of Engineering. He immediately saw the need to invest heavily in infrastructure and have clear visibility into their systems.

  Stock monitoring solutions in GCP are not enough to serve Dave’s DevOps and security needs, especially as their customer base grows.
  

  As a fintech company delivering all its services through a mobile app, Dave’s consumer-based system generates a flood of events. They want to capture all user activities, API calls and logs to harness insights while iterating on products and keeping systems and user data secure.

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  Solution

  Dave chose Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Platform™ as their logging and monitoring solution to provide full app and infrastructure visibility that allows Dave to capture and analyze all the data generated by their unique architecture and their users.
  

  Sumo Logic real-time analytics enables Dave to harness infrastructure and app log insights as they continuously iterate and release products while strengthening their security posture by providing visibility upon each release. The focus on security is operationalized through Sumo Logic security features and integrations with the various tools their security engineers already use—shortening the learning and adoption process dramatically. Sumo Logic also supports Dave’s goal to promote service ownership across their organization by making data easy to observe, understand, and analyze.

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  Results

  With Sumo Logic, Dave now has a powerful logging and monitoring solution in its arsenal to support hypergrowth in the years to come. The Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Platform eliminates blind spots throughout Dave’s unique architecture, with full support for various GCP apps and services, and full integration with the Dave security team’s favorite tools.
  
  

  Observability as a key to promoting ownership org-wide

  The observability that Sumo Logic provides alongside its ability to generate easy-to-understand insights from their logs is crucial in Dave’s thrust to promote service ownership org-wide. Sumo Logic contributes to the transparency that allows all stakeholders to take ownership of the product and take part in constant innovation in improving the services they provide customers. “When you make it very easy for everyone to understand what’s going on in production, that creates ownership. If you don’t make it easy to observe and monitor, the infrastructure and tech app teams are the only ones who will be concerned,” Chou shared.