KB Healthcare is a digital healthcare platform established in 2021 as a subsidiary of KB Insurance. The healthcare service platform “O'CARE (O'CARE)” was launched in February of last year. It also includes advice and goal management based on user health data, and user content recommendations.

OK Care provides healthcare services for B2B customers. Of the respondents who use the service, 87.1% use the service at least once a week. It is said that Watap helped a lot in the background of being able to operate the service stably in less than a year.

In particular, if you operate services in a private cloud environment, you may notice KB Healthcare's introduction of Watap. I met Byeong-chang Son, the team leader of KB Healthcare's IT Innovation Division platform team, in person and heard how they are monitoring with WhaTap.

Please tell me what kind of company KB Healthcare is and what kind of work the team leader does.

KB Healthcare is a subsidiary of KB Insurance. The healthcare service platform “O'CARE (O'CARE)” is currently providing services to KB Finance employees. As the scope of services expands in the future, B2B and B2C services are also planned.

We are organized as an all-cloud. There is no server room. There are no on-premise devices, and it's such an all-cloud environment, but in the team, I'm in charge of cloud operations and big data work.

What is the infrastructure structure of KB Healthcare and the personnel structure of the operation team?

I'm currently using Microsoft's Azure cloud. Also, we are planning a medical platform service in early 2023. This service is being built on AWS. We operate VMs, storage, and security solutions in an all-cloud environment with no on-premise equipment. It consists of Apache, JBoss, and middleware solutions, and cloud infrastructure such as RDB, document DB, and NoSQL DB. WhaTap (WhaTap) is used for application and database monitoring, and Splunk is used to collect IoT device metrics.

Our headquarters includes cloud engineers and big data engineers, and external MSP partner personnel are working together.

I wonder what led me to choose Watab from KB Healthcare.

In February 2022, we launched the O-Care App Service, an O-Care customized health management platform. There were a lot of issues with the service, such as events that attracted concurrent users, application errors, and performance issues.

Solutions such as Application Insights and Azure Monitor are also available on the Azure cloud platform. We were using Splunk to collect and monitor healthcare IoT device matrices and events. Nevertheless, it was difficult to resolve the issues I mentioned. Therefore, I decided to consider introducing an APM solution, and I was introduced to WTAP and several foreign solutions by an outsourced developer and compared them.

The problem during the review of foreign production solutions was the “region” where data is stored. The overseas monitoring solution didn't provide a domestic region. Watap not only provides domestic regions, but can also be installed in a private cloud, so I chose Watab.

Technical support is also an important factor in choosing monitoring. Software manufacturer engineers directly provide technical support and can make technical inquiries in real time via online chat, which is very helpful from an operational standpoint. We also received a lot of help in improving performance during the event.

Please tell us how you have received help while using Watap Monitoring.

First of all, when the O-Care service was first launched, many performance improvements were made. Nowadays, alert notifications are set to only receive risk-level notifications in case specific events and issues occur. Notifications enabled detailed analysis of erroneous queries.

In particular, I am looking at the Watap application monitoring heatmap panel and receiving warning notifications by drilling down to specifically identify transactions with late response times. Watap application monitoring ensures service application availability and enables stable service operation.

Also, I discovered an error in the initial DB design through monitoring the Watap database, and we are continuing to improve it even now.

Is there a reason to use monitoring? Among them, why do you particularly recommend Watap?

I think monitoring is essential for service stability. In particular, in the early days of service launch, users will leave if we fail to resolve performance issues such as connection delays and code errors in a timely manner. With Watap monitoring, I was able to set it to check as soon as a specific event occurred.

By using Watab, I was able to naturally reduce the time to find errors and focus only on service stability. At our KB Healthcare office, the Watap dashboard is always displayed on a large monitor, and developers and solution managers are also watching it on.

For places like us that require data to be stored on an internal network as a corporate policy, I think Watap is the best choice for cloud-native monitoring and can also be installed on an internal network. Another advantage of Watap is that real-time inquiries can be made and the cost is reasonable compared to foreign solutions.