Data. It’s a short word but contains a lot, and today’s intelligent communication platforms — like Dialpad, for example, providing comms to 70,000+ customers worldwide — create a lot of data. This is fine until something goes wrong and needs troubleshooting — when being able to target precisely where the error occurred within a meaningful timeframe becomes the challenge of the day.

This is why Dialpad partnered with Dashbase, because as Dialpad VP of Engineering, Corey Burke, explained in a recent interview for UCTV, “Dialpad handles billions of calls a day. We have a very large framework of microservices that need to interoperate to make those phone calls happen, and our logging gets spread out across different devices, mobile applications, web applications, internal microservices. It makes debugging calls hard. It makes looking for signals for errors a little bit harder.

Visualising the call as a complete interaction

“Having Dashbase take a communication-centric approach, bringing all those logs into one place, allows us to monitor them, allowing us to see cross-service logs — this has been really advantageous in helping us debug and keep communications very reliable for our customer base”

By its very nature, unified communications rely on so many different services working seamlessly together. It’s easy for end-users to overlook the sheer complexity involved — at least when everything is working as it should. As Dialpad’s Engineering Manager, Max Wardell, explained, “we have SIP, RTP, SMS, SMTP, a lot of different protocols — database takes that into account, to unify and bring a holistic view of a ‘call.’” And of course, the mobile and remote revolution of 2020 has only brought more variables into the equation, with an explosion of new devices and networks to take into account.

Dashbase built their solution from the ground up to address this complexity and provide effective troubleshooting and root cause analysis for real-time communications, as Co-Founder and CEO, Alex Munk, explained: “it’s not a UI on top of some existing open-source software… We focus on helping operators to put calls together, to bring logs into the mix of visualizations together with sip traffic, and show that all on a singular view.”

The Dashbase solution is being continually refined to reflect the evolving needs of partners like Dialpad. This close working relationship is key to the ongoing product-market fit in a rapidly changing world. “We’ve been able to hone our roadmap and to make specific functionality required by actual telephony engineers, rather than generic log search capabilities that you might find in other products,” Munk continued.

Spreading happiness from developers to customers

On the user side, as Burke explained, “this leads to a lot of developer happiness… Because you can go very quickly from an alert into what the problem is, so we can debug customer issues really quickly in-house… The Dashbase interface makes them feel comfortable debugging in that system without having to build a really complex query language or do a lot of onboarding and training, so it’s very easy for developers to get on board with Dashbase.”

And when the engineers are happy, the end-users are happy too:

“It’s notably reduced the time we’ve taken to resolve issues, which leads to customer success.” Wardell concluded.

Watch the whole interview on UCTV to understand in more depth how Dashbase has solved Dialpad’s troubleshooting in UC’s most complex and challenging year to date.

Maya Middlemiss

Pinpointing Complexity in Real-Time