Gladly invests in reliability, performance, and uptime year-round through ongoing investments in scale testing, production monitoring, and controlled rollouts of new functionality. This allows us to maintain the high level of service that you expect despite the fact that we are always adding new users and supporting more customer interactions as we grow.
During the holiday season from late November through early January, we know that millions of your customers flock online and to your stores to shop for the holidays. You may ask yourself, “can Gladly handle the increase in traffic with grace and stability during our busiest time of the year?” The short answer is “yes!”
In addition to ongoing testing and monitoring we do year-round, over the holiday season, we focus on the following:
Capacity planning and scale #
Before the holiday season begins, our team ensures that all our services are primed and ready to handle more than the expected load for the coming holiday season. Our team assesses and forecasts how much the possible load increase could be while deliberately overestimating the load our system might experience.
Infrastructure readiness #
We test and verify that the entire Gladly infrastructure and services are ready to handle the increase in concurrent Agents, communications, and API load for the holidays. All infrastructure components, like database, search service, caching service et al., can handle more than expected load during peak times. And If necessary, we scale up these infrastructures and services ahead of time.
Scale testing #
We regularly perform scale and load testing as part of the feature release process. We monitor our environments and alert if resource usage exceeds safe thresholds. Regarding holiday preparedness, we add additional monitoring that allows us to estimate the necessary system capacity to ensure that even at peak load, we will operate with a safe resource capacity buffer across all the services.
Change management #
We always give our customers ample notice of upcoming interruptions. Still, we avoid disruptions around the holidays unless necessary to handle the additional load or other critical issues.
We also mitigate risk by not releasing product updates during the weeks listed below:
- Week of Thanksgiving
- Week of Christmas Holiday
- The week after Christmas Holiday
During the holidays, we understand that your core focus is to help and support your Customers. By using Gladly, there’s no need to worry if Gladly can handle the load of your operations.
