Square staff mobile engineer says Insight Hub Timeline view is like gold
Square is a financial technology company that provides tools to help businesses of all sizes manage payments, operations, and growth. Known for its point-of-sale systems and payment processing services, Square offers a range of solutions from online storefronts to business analytics. The company's goal is to simplify financial services, making it easier for businesses to thrive in a rapidly changing marketplace. Square also partners with banks to ensure transactions are secure and compliant with financial regulations.
Square makes merchant services and digital payments easy
When Square, Inc. was founded in 2009, its objective was to provide an easier way for small business owners to accept credit cards from customers. Today, Square empowers companies of all sizes with a wide range of products and services for payments, loans, customer and employee management, and point of sale (POS) across multiple industries, including retail, food and beverage, and professional services.
Over the years, Square has relied on various error monitoring solutions and used different tools for its Android and iOS applications. “We want to have a single source of truth for crashes across our apps, and we want to be able to apply multiple filters to triage an issue,” explains Anil Umarji, Engineering Manager, Quality, who oversees the Release Operations (RelOps) and Quality (QA) teams.
Consolidating error monitoring for native apps is a top priority
Seven years ago, Square’s Android team migrated to Insight Hub from previously using Crashlytics. Pierre-Yves (PY) Ricau, Staff Engineer, focuses on crashes and performance for Point of Sales (POS) and remembers why Square moved to Insight Hub for its Android error monitoring. “Crashlytics was originally built for iOS. When the company was acquired by Twitter, the team then built an Android solution that wasn’t as customizable and stable as we would have liked,” explains PY.
“What Insight Hub brings to the table is extensive around things like custom indexing, filtering, and searching. It’s a game changer.”
In 2014, when Square adopted Insight Hub for Android, PY noticed an immediate improvement: “With Insight Hub, we have the source of a crash or error right there, which is something we didn’t have with Crashlytics. What Insight Hub brings to the table is extensive around things like custom indexing, filtering, and searching. It’s a game changer.”
Today, Insight Hub is rolled out to Square’s full stack, including web and backend. The iOS team is finishing up its migration to Insight Hub from previously using Crashlytics, which is now Firebase.
“We didn’t have a tool from the iOS perspective where we could apply multiple filters to triage an issue,” states Anil. “From a RelOps and QA perspective, we want to get the best of what’s on Android on iOS. After all, we have unique filters on Insight Hub, and the UI is pretty intuitive. We want that same functionality for iOS, too.”
Insight Hub error details and custom filters enable experimentation, investigation, and timely releases
Because Square uses a lot of shared code across systems, it’s critical that any new features don’t break or affect other features. The move to Insight Hub for the iOS team will simplify QA and RelOps work by providing a single place to look for errors.
“Point of sale is an intersection of all the other verticals at Square. Having POS for both Android and iOS on Insight Hub will help other teams know where the crashes and out-of-memory issues are,” explains Anil. “That’s the biggest advantage I can see from my team’s perspective.”
The RelOps team currently uses Insight Hub for Android throughout its bi-weekly release development cycle and relies on Insight Hub to quickly address bugs that affect stability.
“The Insight Hub dashboard is our go-to page every day to see what’s happening. There are two things we look at: production and our continuous testing,” states Anil. “We use phased rollouts for both Android and iOS, and we use Insight Hub to look at stack traces to see if a similar crash happened in the past and determine if it’s a new crash.”
“The Insight Hub dashboard is our go-to page every day to see what’s happening.”
“The investigation piece is where Insight Hub shines,” states PY. “We can add metadata to breadcrumbs, which helps us understand the steps that led to a crash. And, when you define custom filters, you can then define a list of crashes for a specific set of conditions.”
All new features in Square are also behind a Insight Hub feature flag for easy identification. “From a feature stability perspective, tags help us to know if something broke with the new feature or if it’s something we’ve already found and tagged as one of our critical features,” explains Anil. “We also use custom tags in Insight Hub to make sure there are no regressions.”
There’s one Insight Hub feature in particular that PY believes is a hidden gem. “When I don’t know exactly which crash I’m looking for, Insight Hub’s Timeline view is like gold. It provides visual clues about error rate changes and lets us filter, which is especially helpful for determining if an error is server-related. That type of information is invaluable.”
“When I don’t know exactly which crash I’m looking for, Insight Hub’s Timeline view is like gold.”
Square banks on Insight Hub to encourage product ownership
With teams using one solution for error monitoring and stability, Anil believes Insight Hub will further encourage ownership over the different parts of the applications. “Insight Hub has been a super helpful tool for us from an Android standpoint, and I hope very soon to replicate that with iOS as well,” states Anil.
Looking forward, Square knows its partnership with Insight Hub will help achieve stability across its native applications and full stack. As Anil states, “One thing I really like about Insight Hub is the flexibility to develop what’s on top of what’s already there and the ability to ask for new feature sets from the Insight Hub team.”
“Insight Hub is definitely made for the professional,” PY states. “And Insight Hub is still the best out there.”