Customer case study: Littlepay gets you to work on time with Uptrends
Remember having to buy a paper ticket or a pre-paid travel card to get on the train, tube or metro? Those days are gone.
Now you can simply swipe your debit card, mobile phone or smart watch at the station gates and voila! This is thanks to APIs from payment infrastructure provider Littlepay.
London and Melbourne-based Littlepay APIs interface with transit devices to process passenger payments on over 17,000 buses, trains, and trams in the UK and Ireland. Every tap generates an API call to Littlepay’s application. If those APIs fail for any reason, it could bring entire cities to a halt—literally.
To make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen it needed to monitor its APIs, making sure that each endpoint is alive - but also securely store their client certificates and use them to authenticate the requests coming from checkpoints.
This is where Uptrends got on board
To fully test its APIs, Littlepay needed to simulate an actual device sending requests to its system. Each ticket machine has a unique transport layer security (TLS) client certificate that the device passes to Littlepay’s API for authentication. Uptrends Vault allows Littlepay to securely store their client certificates and use them to authenticate the requests coming from Uptrends checkpoints.
Brendan Buckley, Head of Engineering at Littlepay, said: “We were able to generate a custom client certificate that is only used for Uptrends monitors and actually submit a synthetic transaction to our API. So, the monitor behaves exactly as a real device.”
Using Uptrends’ Vault, Littlepay can control who can see sensitive vault items. Uptrends never shows the values in monitor settings or checks detail reports. Dependable SLA tracking With SLAs, service providers need a way to verify them and have quick access to shareable reports.
Uptrends SLA monitoring allows users to quickly identify SLA problems and customize and generate reports. SLAs were one of the main drivers for Littlepay to look for a tool that would allow it to track SLAs without a lot of work.
“One of the reasons we chose Uptrends was that I didn’t want to be the one to build SLA reports,” said Brendan. “It’s very nice to be able to say, ‘Look here is a report that shows what the availability and uptime were for that month, and we have met the agreed upon SLA.’ Uptrends is very useful to us for SLA reporting,” said Brendan.
True API availability monitoring from your users' locations
Anyone can use a simple HTTP/HTTPS monitor to check if an API is alive, but that doesn’t mean the API is working. Littlepay needs to know that their APIs are available and working 24/7. Uptrends’ Multi-step API enabled Littlepay to simulate full API interactions. With Multi-step API monitoring Littlepay can set up each request and make assertions on the responses for validation.
Then it can extract values and save them to variables allowing you to use the value again later. Littlepay uses Uptrends' global network of 230 checkpoints to verify availability from specific customer locations to see if there are any issues or outages. Flexibility in alerting Uptrends supports multiple channels for alerts: SMS, phone/voice, email, and push notification from the Uptrends app, and easy to set up integrations to StatusHub, Slack, and PagerDuty.
Littlepay used automated alerting from Uptrends, so error alerts are routed through Opsgenie.
“With Uptrends, you can define teams and escalations, but because we have other alerts coming from our own internal monitoring, we needed to feed alerts into a centralized location. So, we used a custom integration in Uptrends to send our alerting to Opsgenie instead of using Slack,” said Brendan.
Littlepay is also looking at using custom metrics from Uptrends as a “final layer of granularity that would be useful to report on.”
Brendan concluded: “We are very happy. It is obvious that you guys continue to develop the platform. When I look at new features you’re putting out like the custom metrics, I think, “How can we use this? How is this going to be useful to us?” Then we put it into place.”
You can read the full customer case study by clicking here.
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