Switching to Axiom, Cal.com engineers solve customer problems easier and more reliably.

Takeaways:

About Cal.com

Cal.com is an open-source scheduling infrastructure that provides a flexible and customizable platform to manage appointments, meetings, and events. Customers and plans range in size from individuals to Vercel to startup bank Mercury. Cal.com integrates with a wide range of calendar platforms, and offers a features like customizable booking pages, automated workflows, and payment integrations. Its open API allows for seamless integration with existing systems, which makes it it a versatile tool to streamline scheduling processes within IT environments.

The Challenge: dig through events, hoping none were lost

Cal.com is built entirely in next.js and hosted on Vercel. Seeking a log management tool in Vercel’s integrations marketplace, they chose another popular tool.

Logs were essential to providing customer support. When customers reported an error message, Cal.com’s customer support team would forward it to engineering along with the date, time and other context to help them look for the cause. “An unexpected error occurred” on a customer’s screen told them nothing by itself. It would need to be matched in date and time to events in Cal.com’s logs to find that, say, a Google API had returned an error while trying to schedule a calendar event.

But CEO Bailey Pumfleet says that before long, they realized they were having problems. “Important errors weren’t coming through. We were losing logs,” he says. Moreover, he found himself needing to prod engineers to look through logs for troubleshooting.

“People weren’t really diving in,” he says, because log searches had proven both challenging and frequently doomed to failure. “You get lost in the tool, or it's somehow dropped some of the logs that you needed ingested. So you're not finding the right data, so you get frustrated, so you’re not going to use it as much.”

The Solution: 100% of events, inviting to use and customize

Bailey and the engineers looked for another Vercel-integrated log tool and decided to give Axiom a try. “It looked like a good product by a far smaller startup without the bloat of an older company, which really resonates with us. So we’re like hey, let’s give it a go. Immediately I liked it much better in comparison.” They were impressed with how quickly they could set up dashboards, use Axiom’s plugin to create visualizations in Grafana, or route selected data from Axiom’s 100% single source to other tools as needed.

It wasn’t only Bailey. The combination of 100% event retention and easier learning curve drew engineers into using Axiom more, he says. “Our engineers are much, much more likely to actually dive in and look at the logs now that we use Axiom. Our previous tool touted all kinds of other functionality, but you needed to build up an effort to go in there and root around to learn where things are and find the thing you're looking for. The beautiful thing about Axiom is it just works. No complications, no rubbish. It's way quicker to find that one thing you want to do. So there's much less friction to get in there and solve your problem.”

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