At MIC, our mission is to provide businesses around the world with smart software solutions. We aim to facilitate global trade, keep imports and exports moving and provide our customers with both the tools they need to operate and the confidence that they're keeping compliant with all relevant regulations.
To do this, we've built what we believe to be the world's most comprehensive customs Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool, which has now replaced previous on-premises options. But a key part of our commitment to customers is that we're constantly monitoring, updating and improving our technology to meet the needs of our users.
So what do we do to achieve this? Read on to learn more about how we ensure our systems are always available to meet customer needs.
The importance of a reliable software solution
High availability is non-negotiable in today's environment. Even short periods of downtime can cost businesses significant amounts of money. In global trade - and especially for firms running just-in-time operations - any issues can quickly escalate into serious problems for a company. Potential consequences of this may include:
- Delays at customs
- Manufacturing or processing shutdowns
- Lost revenue
- Missed service level agreement targets
- Damaged customer trust
As such, firms need highly reliable software solutions. In order to achieve this, it's essential to have a clear monitoring and observability strategy to provide insight into status and observe ongoing behavior within the system. It's also important to identify errors and anomalies and react to them quickly, ideally before users are affected.
Behind the scenes: Our technology and processes
To achieve this and keep all of our technology running as smoothly and productively as possible, we use a variety of monitoring tools across the entire technology stack in order to support high availability, minimize downtime and boost user trust.
Our stack includes tools for:
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Application performance monitoring
- Logging and alerting
- Security monitoring
All our tools go beyond simple monitoring. Our approach involves gaining deeper insights into the internal workings of a system, looking at its behavior, performance and interactions.
This is called observability, and it provides more detailed context and diagnostic capabilities. In turn, this results in faster and more effective troubleshooting and problem resolution across our systems.
Let's look at some of our key tools in more detail.
- Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that provides real-time dashboards. This lets us visualize performance and gain insights into system health using metrics, logs and traces across various data sources. We use both self-hosted Grafana and Grafana Cloud instances for specific environments.
- Prometheus gathers and collates metrics data from sources such as application servers, services and containers. Its powerful PromQL language enables us to conduct in-depth queries into performance.
While these are commonly-used tools, what makes our deployments unique is the custom-built processes we've created around them to enhance the value of these tools and deliver the best possible performance at all times. Here's where we stand out:
Building Observability from the Start: Early Monitoring to Accelerate Quality
Reliable monitoring is essential, but it's even more powerful when it begins early in the development cycle. That’s why we’re refining our strategy to embed observability right from the start: in our internal QA environments during development. We’ve built a custom, automated process that provisions monitoring resources right in our internal QA environment.
Why does that matter? Because it allows us to catch regressions and performance issues early, before they ever reach customers. Just like developers test new features in a safe environment first, we apply the same principle to monitoring. Each monitoring setup is validated against strict quality gates, ensuring it meets our standards for reliability and clarity.
Once approved, these resources are automatically deployed to production through a streamlined pipeline. The result? Teams can build observability into their products from the start - without extra effort - leading to faster feedback loops, fewer surprises and more stable releases. Early observability is more than a technical choice; it’s a strategy for building better software.
Synthetic monitoring and 24/7 responses
We use modern synthetic monitoring alongside 24/7 on-call support to respond to any problems swiftly. If critical issues do occur, our automated systems spot this, with qualified personnel alerted via phone call, day or night.
A culture of shared responsibility
We believe it's important for everyone to share responsibility, which is why our observability systems are not owned by a central team. Instead, the actual product experts (i.e. the development teams) own the monitoring for their product.
Why transparency matters
We believe it's important that our customers have full trust in our services, which is why we're happy to share the technology behind our systems and how they work to deliver the best value for users. This transparency is vital in providing our partners, clients and regulators with the confidence they need.
Monitoring and observability must be ongoing efforts to ensure availability and performance in an uncertain environment. At MIC, we're always looking to improve how we do this to enhance our technology and deliver the best possible experience to our customers.
