Wag! Turns Data into Actions with AWS Marketplace

In 2015, Wag! established its on-demand dog walking marketplace, which offers pet parents more flexibility to manage everyday life. The mobile app is now available in all 50 states and 4,600 cities, providing instant access to experienced and trustworthy dog walkers, trainers, boarding hosts, and sitters. The team at Wag! faced the challenge of a growing stockpile of business data that needed to be compiled from several sources and then analyzed and determined solutions built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) could help conquer that challenge. The company turned to AWS Marketplace and its assortment of software vendors.

The first problem the team needed to address was how to visualize all the data from various systems across the company. To gather this data and turn it into actionable insights, Wag! procured Sumo Logic’s data analytics from AWS Marketplace. Sumo Logic provides a secure, cloud-native analytics platform that helps enterprises make data-driven decisions. Chief technology officer Mazi Arjomand recalls, “We needed a tool that provided deeper visibility into how our systems were running across the board. We chose Sumo Logic because it could ingest data from our various tools. This allowed us to spend less time debugging issues, because we now have prebuilt queries and dashboards that give us a snapshot of the entire ecosystem.”

Sumo Logic’s ability to log and generate insights from data brought immediate value to engineers, but it was its preemptive insights that proved to be a game-changer. “If there's a variance in the rate of success or failure responses, Sumo Logic warns us without our setting explicit thresholds. This has helped us keep systems stable and decrease mean time to acknowledge,” reports Arjomand.

With the internal data now being used to power decision making, Wag! focused on simplifying the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process. With a lean data team, Wag! needed to centralize data from external sources quickly and efficiently, and Fivetran was the right tool for the job. Fivetran is an integrated system for cloud services, databases, and, business intelligence that extracts all a company’s data from the cloud to its data warehouse. Arjomand says of the tool, “We use Fivetran to ingest data from various platforms like Zendesk, Stripe, or other databases. With a small engineering team, we’re able to go through and set up the integrations we need in a short amount of time. Without Fivetran, it would have taken a lot of manual work and a large data engineering team to ingest and report on all this data.”

Using the private offers from these sellers in AWS Marketplace has helped Wag! gain more insight from complex datasets and operate efficiently with a small team of engineers. The success the company found with Sumo Logic and Fivetran led to procuring several other solutions from AWS Marketplace, which has helped transition its procurement model. Embracing AWS Marketplace has also allowed Wag! to establish new business relationships that are mutually beneficial. Arjomand proclaimed, “Private offers allow us to tailor contracts to our specific needs in terms of our usage and growth rates with these platforms. We’ve built strong, healthy relationships with these partners where we can grow together.”