Glovo is a Barcelona-based startup and the fastest-growing delivery player in Europe, Hispanic America and Africa. With food at the core of the business, Glovo delivers any product within its coverage areas at any time of day. The company currently delivers over 100M orders annually and operates in over 400 cities in 22 countries.

To reach that goal, Glovo needs to ensure that, as the delivery service continues to grow, the backend infrastructure and core applications continue to scale alongside it. Joan Martinez, Engineering Manager of Infrastructure and Security at Glovo, is largely responsible for overseeing the reliability and scalability of Glovo’s infrastructure. “Our core responsibilities as part of the Engineering team are to 1) ensure critical systems are reliable and scalable and 2) support the growth of the Engineering team by providing tooling and improving the feedback loop to create more autonomy across the organization,” shared Martinez.

To ensure a reliable experience to their users and customers, Glovo needed to rethink their incident management process for the entire organization.

Challenges Faced

When Martinez joined Glovo, PagerDuty was already implemented as its incident management platform; however, with a team of over roughly 60 engineers that was growing rapidly, there was only one on-call responder responsible for the entire platform.

The team faced several challenges as a result, including:

• Difficulty onboarding new responders to the platform
• Lack of ownership across critical systems and services
• Increased time-to-detect due to a lack of monitoring and observability across systems and services
• Higher mean-time-to-recover because of a one-engineer on-call rotation
• Poor visibility into the health of the infrastructure for key stakeholders, such as service owners, users, partners, and executive leadership

Getting Everyone On the Same Page With PagerDuty

In order to include more teams in the on-call rotation, Martinez’ team adopted principles of DevOps by integrating PagerDuty into their incident management process. This included breaking down on-call rotations by service, ensuring all teams had someone on call that was knowledgeable about a given service or application, and empowering service ownership across the Engineering organization. “PagerDuty really allowed us to adopt DevOps practices, and really build upon and improve our existing processes, rather than ripping and replacing everything,” explained Martinez.

To further improve stakeholder communication and consistently deliver a perfect customer experience, Glovo uses PagerDuty Modern Incident Response across the organization. “Typically, when you work an incident, you just focus on solving it and communication is not a high priority,” explained Martinez. “But with PagerDuty, we can just automate response plays and automatically notify key stakeholders about the status throughout the course of an incident. It’s a really important benefit for our organization.”

Focusing On Integrations and Team Health

PagerDuty has also played an important role in helping Glovo centralize its technology stack to improve communication and collaboration across different solutions. With PagerDuty’s Slack integration, teams are able to trigger, respond, and resolve incidents all within the Slack application. Glovo also uses PagerDuty’s Datadog integration to help centralize the majority of its monitoring data onto the PagerDuty platform. Additionally, Martinez’ team leverages PagerDuty’s integration with Jira to automatically create a ticket when incidents are triggered. “This integration allows our team to focus solely on the incident rather than the backend work and ticket creation process,” Martinez said.

Glovo also uses PagerDuty Analytics, which gives teams an in-depth look at metrics behind the incident management process and allows managers to better understand technical issues and quantify team health from a process perspective. With PagerDuty Analytics, managers now have better insight into responder health, which helps them ensure on-call engineers aren’t being overwhelmed with on-call tasks and getting burnt out.

Benefits With PagerDuty

By using PagerDuty for their digital operations, Glovo has seen several benefits, including:

• Improved stakeholder communication and increased automation into the incident response process with PagerDuty Modern Incident Response
• The ability to acknowledge, troubleshoot, and resolve incidents from anywhere with the PagerDuty mobile app
• Improved visibility across tools and solutions with PagerDuty’s ecosystem of 350+ integrations
• Better system reliability across mission-critical services, which improved the user and customer experience and reduced mean-time-to-resolve
• Increased visibility into technical areas of improvement and team health with PagerDuty Analytics

“Our teams love PagerDuty because we just know it’s reliable and we can depend on it,” shared Martinez.

Future Looking

Glovo is laser-focused on building upon DevOps principles and continuing to expand the use of PagerDuty across its infrastructure as the company scales its services. Martinez also plans to use PagerDuty’s integration with Terraform to remove a lot of the manual work and help build response automation into the team’s existing processes. Additionally, the team is looking into PagerDuty Event Intelligence to see how AIOps and automation can help uplevel digital operations and incident management capabilities.

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