Enhancing operational resilience: How FieldEx leverages DigitalOcean's Snapshooter for 99.99% uptime

FieldEx, a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is software that helps businesses keep track of their equipment, schedule maintenance, and manage repairs. Ensuring operational resilience and robust disaster recovery processes is a top priority.

FieldEx serves a diverse customer base across Asia, ANZ, and Africa, with client organizations ranging in size from 10 to over 700 users. Our customers span a wide range of industries, including coffee machine servicing, heavy machinery, construction, CCTV and alarm systems, telecommunications and fiber optics, water and air purification, retail, and financial services.

With this global customer base relying on FieldEx’s services for their 24/7 operations, the company faces an increased need to ensure high availability and rapid recovery during unforeseen events (including natural disasters, cyber incidents, system failures, etc.). To maintain seamless service, FieldEx requires a robust framework capable of swift recovery, minimal downtime, and streamlined failover.

DigitalOcean Products

FieldEx deploys its business on DigitalOcean Droplets. They also have built out a multi-level resilience strategy with Snapshooter Backups, Reserved IPs, and Static IPs:

SnapShooter Backups

DigitalOcean SnapShooter is a powerful backup utility that delivers automated, simplified backups for all servers, ensuring data restoration is fast and predictable. It’s a vital component of the FieldEx Rapid Emergency Action & Business Continuity Toolkit (REACT) framework. This facilitates automated, efficient backups across all servers, ensuring data restoration is swift and reliable.

Reserved IPs

Reserved IPs act as publicly accessible addresses assigned to specific server functions. They ensure high availability by allowing Droplets (servers) to be reassigned to these IPs without impacting public-facing services. This enables seamless failover or server migration, maintaining operational continuity even during disruptions.

Static IPs

Static IPs are permanently assigned to individual servers and remain unchanged throughout their lifecycle. Unlike Reserved IPs, Static IPs are tied to specific Droplets and cannot be reassigned, providing additional stability and reliability.

Benefits Realized

Since building with DigitalOcean FieldEx has experienced various benefits. Reserved and Static IPs have provided robust failover mechanisms and uninterrupted accessibility. By implementing Snapshooter based backups, FieldEx was able to reduce their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) on their full systems from two hours to 25 minutes.

The daily backups enable on-demand spin up of DigitalOcean Droplets thereby saving cost at the same time flexibility for restoration and analysis for service improvements. They’ve also experienced minimal downtime thanks to Snapshooter and simplified failover processes with Reserved IP reassignment to improve efficiency.

“Thanks to all of these improvements with fantastic support from DigitalOcean we’ve earned robust customer trust through our consistently maintained 99.99% uptime, reinforcing FieldEx’s reputation for reliability” shared Vijay Dharmaraj, Chief Architect & Security Officer at FieldEx.