Featured Customer: Energy Essentials

This week we're taking a look at how Energy Essentials uses Seq in their solutions for the utilities sector.

Energy Essentials supports customers in the utilities sector through process management, software development and statistical analyses. We help customers to get the most out of their systems in a complex environment, with projects ranging from small middleware solutions to large implementations that fully support our customers’ business models.

We built the Vertex software platform as a feature-rich foundation for great applications, within the legal requirements and agreements between market parties in the utilities market.

Having a practical mindset and a lot of experience in maintaining an IT landscape that houses the complex processes of the utilities market, we believe in pro-active monitoring of a healthy business process stack.

With Seq we can achieve this goal far easier then before. The tremendous flexibility of Seq allowed us to forward logging information securely from a customer’s environment directly to our central server over HTTPS. With minimal effort we now have an up-to-date and easy way of monitoring all of our implementations at our various customers.

The Seq portal provides an easy-to-use monitoring view for common problems, and through Seq’s extensibility, it is very easy to set up alerts for customer-specific sets of events. Finally, the possibility to use logging contexts provides a very powerful way to group logging events to a single higher level operation or process.

Before we used Seq for our logging, we used a custom high-performance solution with support for rule-based notifications. It was functional, but the feature request list was ever-growing while it was becoming a more and more integral part of our Vertex platform. Any bug in the logging implementation would have widespread consequences. These were among the main reasons to find a complete turn-key solution that fit our needs.

We almost gave up our search for a perfect logging solution, stumped by the complexity of some, while becoming completely frustrated by the stupidity of others. Then we found Seq and fully integrated it with our Vertex platform in almost no time at all. It worked out-of-the-box and has been working since. The extensibility system works perfectly and so far we've been able to find all remaining functionality online through the package installer.

We’re currently in the process of integrating Seq with our operations dashboard, which will run on large monitors overlooking our operations team to present important log entries and use the powerful query functionality of Seq to present real time application performance feedback. Because the Seq front-end is built on a REST API, it’s easy to take full advantage of the functionality already offered by Seq to integrate log data into any other web application.

Energy Essentials is located in Maastricht, The Netherlands. More information can be found on our website: https://www.energyessentials.nl.

This post was kindly provided by Yorick Smeets, Co-founder of Energy Essentials Group B.V.