End-to-End Flow Health

The Challenge

A logistics platform integrated with 4 external vendors for shipping, tracking, payments, and notifications. When shipments stalled, the on-call team had to manually check each vendor's status page and correlate timestamps in spreadsheets.

Symptoms:

• P1 incidents averaged 3+ hours to diagnose
• Alert fatigue: 200+ daily alerts, 90%+ were noise
• Vendor changes broke flows without warning
• Customer-reported issues had no single source of truth

The Approach

Discovery Phase

Mapped the critical shipment flow end-to-end:

1. Order placement → internal order service
2. Carrier assignment → Vendor A
3. Label generation → Vendor B
4. Tracking updates → Vendor C
5. Customer notification → Vendor D

Identified 6 handoff points where visibility dropped to zero.

Instrumentation Phase

Deployed flow-aware monitoring:

• Correlation IDs across all vendor API calls
• Business-impact thresholds (not just technical errors)
• Vendor SLA tracking with baseline expectations

Alerting Redesign

Replaced system-level alerts with flow-health alerts:

• "Shipment completion rate dropped 15% vs. baseline"
• "Carrier assignment latency exceeds SLA for priority tier"
• "Tracking updates from Vendor C delayed >2 hours"

The Outcome

Diagnosis time: Hours → Minutes

• On-call can see exactly where a shipment flow broke
• Root cause visible in seconds, not hours of correlation

Alert reduction: 90%+ noise eliminated

• Only 8-12 actionable alerts per day vs. 200+ before
• Each alert includes flow context and suggested investigation path

Vendor accountability:

• Historical SLA data enables renegotiation
• Changes detected before customers report issues

Key Insight

The platform wasn't under-monitored—it was over-monitored at the wrong level. System metrics don't answer "is the business working?" Flow-level observability does.