Freshworks DevOps team improves CSAT to 95% with Freshservice

About Freshworks DevOps team

Freshworks DevOps team is responsible for availability, performance, change management, monitoring, emergency response and capacity planning of cloud infrastructure. It should be noted that the team manages a massive infrastructure of approximately 4000+ servers with over 60+ AWS accounts and is planning to scale even more to accommodate the organization’s growth.

Problem Statement

Freshworks has grown from a startup offering just one product to a multi-product enterprise with a global presence. Initially the DevOps team had to manage 1 data center and 2 AWS account; now in line with the growth, the DevOps team has to manage more than 60+ AWS accounts and maintain/monitor 4 data centers globally.

The DevOps team was finding it challenging to manage the cloud infrastructure and perform access management. Additionally, it was also getting difficult to keep track of previous issues that was resolved. To add to their woes, since the on-call engineers change every week, context on the most recent outages are lost to the next on-call engineer. It was also tricky to ensure the on-call engineers do not suffer burn out.

What Freshservice offered

Change Management: One of the most important and critical functioning of the DevOps team- rolling out changes regularly in production. With the help of Freshservice’s change management feature, rolling out changes has become seamless and easy to track.

Service Catalog: Freshworks DevOps team relies on the Service Catalog feature of Freshservice to manage the access request of all of Freshworks’ engineers to AWS, GitHub and Sumo Logic. Previously, it was difficult to efficiently deliver access management. The scale of growth lead to the problem of requests getting buried in emails affecting the team’s productivity. With the service catalog feature of Freshservice, the DevOps team, now smoothly delivers access management for more than 60 AWS accounts.

Incident Management: In order to effectively keep track of the tickets recorded, the DevOps team relies on the the incident management feature of Freshservice. 8 DevOps engineers working on different time zones, taking turns to stay on call 24x7 can be quite taxing. Previously, the team found it difficult to keep track of who resolved what issue and the current status. Only bare minimum information was available, making it difficult to get more context about an issue. With incident management, every ticket status and historical information can be tracked. The DevOps team lead can also get an understanding on the number of issues the engineers (agents) have resolved and intervene and avoid potential burn outs.

Problem Management: A secret ingredient to the Freshworks DevOps team’s success is the efficient use of problem management feature of Freshservice. [The team uses this feature when production incidents occur; the uses the problem feature to arrive at the Root cause analysis and intra and inter-team communication. This allows the engineers / stakeholders from different teams to collaborate within the set deadlines!]

Delving deep into issues that arises while conducting a root-cause analysis, automating wherever possible. Adopting this best practice has enabled the Freshworks DevOps team to manage the massive growth of the organization very seamlessly.

Successes

From having no data to understand their team’s performance, the Freshworks DevOps team has utilized Freshservice’s rich analytics to the full extent to understand their team’s performance.