Our commitment to delivering a reliable service: behind the scenes
In retail, having accurate, reliable information is essential for making daily decisions; without it, suppliers risk missing opportunities and losing sales. At SKUtrak, we pride ourselves on delivering timely insights to our users, even when unexpected challenges arise.
We discussed with Hien Quan, Infrastructure and Platform Manager at SKUtrak, a recent retailer networking issue which impacted a key data feed and how the SKUtrak team uses continuous monitoring and forensic analysis to provide reliable information to our users.
Despite the complexities involved, our team was able to identify and mitigate the problem. In this blog post, we share a behind-the-scenes look at the work that goes on to ensure SKUtrak remains a service that our users can rely on.
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“This incident underscores the importance of subscribing to status page alerts to stay informed of any data feed disruptions in real time.” Hien Quan, Infrastructure and Platform Manager at SKUtrak
Deep-dive into the incident
Can you tell us a bit about the incident?
“We received an automated alert indicating that a retailer data feed update was much slower than usual, which quickly prompted us to investigate,” shares Hien. “It was clear that something wasn’t right; we were getting unusually slow response times when querying the retailer’s system. Our first step was to notify our customers about the delay and let them know we were working to identify the cause of the issue.”
What did you find?
“Our initial analysis gave us a critical clue about the data source’s location—it was on the US East Coast,” explains Hien. “Using Traceroute, we discovered that our network traffic was passing through the Zayo Network, which was experiencing issues at the time. A look at the Global Outages Map confirmed that points along the US East Coast were facing network challenges, largely due to adverse weather conditions impacting connectivity in the area.”
What was the outcome of your investigation?
“Once we had a solid understanding of the issue and its cause, we updated our customers immediately,” says Hien. “Unfortunately, it was out of our direct control, so our focus shifted to monitoring the situation closely for any signs of improvement. We kept our customers informed throughout, updating them as soon as there was any change via our status page. Thankfully, after a few hours, the issue was resolved, and we resumed normal operations.”
What does this mean for SKUtrak users?
“At SKUtrak, our customers can rely on us to stay on top of incidents like these,” Hien affirms. “Our dedicated monitoring and quick response efforts ensure we’re always working to minimise disruption. We keep customers informed every step of the way with reliable, fast, and accurate updates.”
