To help their customer’s development and design teams create an inclusive brand experience for their patrons, Olo builds out customizable white-label mobile apps for clients. When Olo was building the first model of the white-label app, Greg Shackles, Principal Engineer, needed to make sure it was error free.

“Crashes can be devastating for any mobile application,” Greg says. “A bug in one of our apps means there's probably a bug in a hundred of our apps. We need to combat that as soon as possible.”

As a technical lead, Greg is the driver of technical solutions across Olo’s infrastructure. They pay attention to logs and metrics provided by tools like Datadog and SumoLogic, and recognized that Raygun’s Crash Reporting would complement their monitoring stack to help provide fully integrated error monitoring in production across all of their various systems.

With Raygun, Olo now had the end-to-end visibility needed to build a reliable and scalable white-label mobile app. Preventing errors before they became a problem meant they were now able to save the company time spent in potential re-work and bug fixing efforts.

Ultimately, all that really matters is how real users are feeling when they use your product. Raygun allows you to connect crash reporting, real user monitoring, and application monitoring together so you can see what that user experience is like from start to finish. That's incredibly powerful.

Greg Shackles - Principal Engineer

Great software experiences help Olo win in a highly competitive market

The end-user experience is critical when it comes to online ordering — just one broken payment button or slow loading page could cause sales to drop as customers abandon pages.

Monitoring a lot of mobile apps for performance problems could be seen as a challenge. But by holistically monitoring each app using the Raygun Platform, Olo’s development team can build a story about the quality of the user’s experience, demonstrating their success to the rest of the organization.

The team at Olo finds Raygun an important part of their technology stack for revealing the root cause of performance issues.

The flame charts showing server-side performance timings highlighted lingering issues in production. Greg explains, “After installing Raygun, we attempted to reproduce a recent production issue that took a while to track down. A brief look at the flame charts quickly pointed to the problem in a fraction of the time it had taken us before.”

Creating flawless software experiences at scale

As consumers get more comfortable with the online ordering process, analysts predict that by 2023, over US$200 billion of the US$800 billion restaurant industry will be generated from online ordering.

Olo’s priority is to scale with that growth.

“We have bigger and bigger clients in the system, and as a part of that; harder problems,” Greg explains. “It’s my job to figure out how we build a more scalable system so we can handle the needs of those clients and provide their users with the standard of experiences that we want to deliver. From my perspective, Raygun plays a critical role in that, because if you don't know your users are experiencing errors, you can’t provide that level of service.”

“The last place that you want to hear that something is wrong in one of your applications is through a customer complaining — whether it's in an App Store review or going directly to the brand. Raygun allows us to have that introspection in real-time. We have visibility into people hitting errors so we can take action before the problem escalates.”

Regardless of what type of product you're building it's easy to get started and quickly get real visibility into what your users are actually experiencing.

About Olo

Olo is a privately held company that creates a digital ordering platform for restaurants like Denny’s, Five Guys, Shake Shack, Jamba Juice, and more. Olo’s mission is to give customers better, faster, and more personal service from the restaurants they love.

Of the publicly traded restaurants going digital in the United States, over 50% use Olo for digital ordering and delivery.