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Case Study

GOAT uses Embrace to remain 99.99% crash-free amidst record traffic on Black Friday

Black Friday is one of the most important events of the year. We use Embrace to monitor our platform and troubleshoot any problems while the live event is going on.
Chris To VP of Technology, GOAT

Customer

GOAT is the global platform for the greatest products from the past, present, and future. It has become the leading and most trusted sneaker marketplace in the world, and has expanded to offer apparel and accessories with over 350 brands. GOAT is uniquely positioned between the primary and resale markets, delivering products to over 30 million members across 170 countries.

Challenge

Traditional mobile monitoring tools lacked the metrics and information needed to efficiently troubleshoot issues, especially during live events. GOAT engineers needed a solution to help them identify and solve issues quickly.

Results

With Embrace, GOAT gets the comprehensive, actionable data needed to quickly troubleshoot user-impacting issues, enabling GOAT to succeed in high traffic, limited timeframe opportunities like Black Friday.

GOAT is the global platform for the greatest products from the past, present, and future

In 2015, GOAT pioneered the “ship-to-verify” business model to bring trust and safety to the sneaker marketplace. The platform enables buyers and sellers to connect seamlessly, eliminating friction from the marketplace while managing the supply chains and operational logistics required to deliver authenticated products with ease. Since then, GOAT has expanded to offer apparel and accessories from select emerging, contemporary, and iconic brands.

GOAT now has 13 authentication facilities around the world, over 350 brands and 30 million members across 170 countries.

Firebase and Fabric did not help manage user-impacting issues

Before Embrace, GOAT engineers relied on Firebase and Fabric for identifying and solving issues in the mobile app. But since neither tool delivered insights based on the user experience, GOAT engineers had to manually string together visibility across multiple tools.

Traditional mobile monitoring is not built for the user’s perspective. You have to stitch backend logs with a crash to get the user story. It’s very time-consuming, and it is not easy to piece all the information together.
Chris To VP of Technology

With Embrace, GOAT has access to comprehensive session-level data for every user experience, so they can immediately look up a user and reproduce their session to understand what went wrong.

If CX reports a specific user issue, I can use the Embrace dashboard to look up the user’s session and see the entire user’s experience. With Firebase and Fabric, the only data we had was crash logs.
Alvin Yu Senior Software Engineer, iOS

Embrace’s session replay enables GOAT to have a seamless Black Friday event

Black Friday is one of the biggest days of the year for GOAT, and they rely on Embrace’s real-time visibility to effectively triage and solve issues as quickly as possible.

We look at social feedback to identify problems fast and early. When a user sends a screenshot, we immediately look up the session in Embrace to understand what’s happening. It allows us to quickly triage the issue, so we can reach out to the appropriate team to fix the issue.
Jarrod Holliday Engineering Manager

Because Embrace collects every user session, GOAT engineers can instantly look up any complaint and reproduce the issue. This empowers them to go directly from a single user complaint to identifying a failing network call in the backend that needs to be addressed.

On Black Friday, the average session time jumps from 3 minutes to 8 minutes. People spend more time in the app, and get to the app in different ways, like coupons, links, and social shares. If there’s an issue with deeplinking or users running into edge cases while navigating the app, we can investigate those with Embrace.
Alvin Yu Senior Software Engineer, iOS

With traditional monitoring tools, if an issue shows up, it can be difficult to calculate the impact in an actionable way.

I need to get to the impact as soon as possible. With Embrace, we can isolate new crash patterns to the devices they affect and put out a hotfix for them.
Jarrod Holliday Engineering Manager

GOAT is able to successfully handle the surge in traffic that live events such as Black Friday bring, achieving a 99.99% crash-free sessions rate despite a 44% increase in traffic across iOS and Android apps.

Embrace is an essential part of GOAT’s release workflow

GOAT releases new app versions in phased rollouts so they can investigate any issues that come up using the Embrace dashboard.

Before we send a new release to every user, we check Embrace to see the impact of any issues that pop up. We can see where in the app the problem occurred and prioritize based on the issue’s severity.
Alvin Yu Senior Software Engineer, iOS

In mobile, the companies that succeed are the ones that continue to innovate and deliver value to users without sacrificing the underlying user experience. By using a mobile-first partner like Embrace, GOAT is able to effectively troubleshoot user complaints, monitor new releases, and triage live events like Black Friday. Embrace is happy to help GOAT and other teams improve mobile experiences everywhere with complete observability into performance and stability.

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