FreedomPay Improves Payment Reliability and Developer Efficiency with Dynatrace

FreedomPay is a disruptor in digital commerce, dedicated to transforming merchants’ legacy payment systems to be more resilient, secure, and high performing. To support this mission, FreedomPay has undergone a transformation to modernize its IT operating model. Central to this journey was ensuring developers have the data they need to create great payments experiences, underpinned by a unified observability strategy that provides visibility into both on-premises systems and Azure cloud services.

While these insights significantly reduced the time it takes developers to resolve problems and helped to enhance transaction speeds on its platform, FreedomPay recognized an opportunity to drive further benefits by creating a more collaborative culture with its customers. FreedomPay wanted to extend its use of observability data to create a common language between both its developers and customers. Its goal was to offer its customers deep insight into the performance of FreedomPay’s systems and the real-time transactions they support, so they could work collaboratively to improve payment services.

To increase transparency and alignment with customers, FreedomPay used Dynatrace to create a shared customer dashboard. Powered by Grail and business events, the dashboards provide customers with deeper insights and a clearer view of their data beyond a simple status page, with information on business analytics, response times, error rate, and more. This enables them to easily see how the business value is connected to technical metrics needed for troubleshooting or improvement.

“Dynatrace has many benefits for developers, especially if you’re thinking in an ‘expand left’ mindset,” said Victoria Ruffo, Software Engineering Team Lead, FreedomPay. “The platform allows a developer to see exactly what's going on, so they can go back to their code and troubleshoot. It's easy to share information on Dynatrace with your teammates and customers as well. You just share a link, and they see exactly what you're seeing – no more questioning if they are looking at the same data or not.”

• Improved collaboration: Working with a major food retailer – which was also a Dynatrace customer – FreedomPay developed its first shared dashboard. The retailer now has real-time insight into how all of its payments data is flowing without having to rely on FreedomPay to provide a status check. This has streamlined collaboration while giving developers and business leaders in both parties richer data to triage issues and optimize services for better payment experiences.
• Faster innovation: Dynatrace has enabled FreedomPay to adopt an ‘extend-left’ strategy, giving developers all the data and context they need to build better-performing applications that enhance customer experiences. As a result of this, FreedomPay is able to deliver more innovative and seamless payment journeys, helping to maintain its reputation as a disruptor in the digital commerce market.
• More reliable payments: By providing a unified source of observability across on-premises, Azure cloud, and third-party payments environments, Dynatrace has improved FreedomPay’s ability to respond to issues before users are impacted by 99%. FreedomPay’s developers use Dynatrace to set up real-time alerts that pinpoint the precise root cause of application failures. This has reduced MTTI from around two months to just two minutes in one instance, allowing the team to proactively resolve the issue before customers even noticed.
• Enabling data-driven decisions: FreedomPay is using Dynatrace Grail technology to ingest logs alongside other observability data to give developers a more complete understanding of application issues and reduce troubleshooting time. The richness of insights delivered through this approach sets FreedomPay apart from its competitors in a world where every second impacts customer satisfaction in their payment journey.

“I don't think we could get to where we are going as FreedomPay without a platform like Dynatrace,” comments Mark Tomlinson, Senior Director of Observability and Performance at FreedomPay. “Dynatrace is invaluable to FreedomPay, because it's faster, so you don't waste developer time. You've got an incredible amount of data that is organized exactly the right way so you can solve problems and optimize services for yourself and for your customers.”