Clandestine
Clandestine
Clandestine operates a high-volume direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform running flash sales and seasonal campaigns for premium consumer brands.
Insights from
Sofia Reyes
Head of Platform Engineering
Clandestine protected $2.4M in sales during peak season with Sola
Running flash sales means massive traffic spikes — and serious risk. Clandestine uses Sola to protect every checkout, at every moment.
"During our biggest sales event of the year, our checkout API went down. We knew about it in 30 seconds. We had it fixed in 4 minutes. Without Sola, that would have been a $200K problem."
- Sofia Reyes
/ Head of Platform Engineering
Challenge
E-commerce doesn't pause for incidents. For Clandestine, a checkout failure during a peak flash sale isn't just an engineering problem — it's directly lost revenue with no way to recover it.
Clandestine runs some of the highest-velocity sales events in direct-to-consumer e-commerce, with traffic spikes that can push checkout volume up 20x in minutes. Their previous monitoring couldn't keep up — alerts were slow to fire, noisy, and rarely included enough context to act fast. During a major sale in early 2024, a payment API degradation went undetected for 11 minutes. By the time the team was paged, thousands of carts had been abandoned. That incident was the turning point.
Solution
Clandestine rebuilt their observability stack around Sola, prioritizing fast detection during high-traffic windows and clean, actionable alerts that don't require a war room to interpret.
Sola monitors Clandestine's checkout, payment, and inventory APIs at 30-second intervals from 18 regions. Before every major sale event, the team runs a monitoring health check in Sola to confirm all critical endpoints are responsive. During events, Sola's dashboard gives the on-call team a live view of global service health, with automatic incident creation and Slack notifications for any degradation. The entire on-call workflow — detection, triage, and stakeholder communication — now runs through a single interface.
Results
Peak season no longer means sleepless nights for Clandestine's platform team. With Sola running 24/7 monitoring across every critical surface, the team can focus on the sale — not the safety net.
$2.4M in revenue protected during peak season campaigns
Detection time reduced from 11+ minutes to under 30 seconds
Zero checkout disruptions across the last 6 major sale events
On-call response time improved by over 80%
Incident communication to stakeholders automated via Slack
"Peak season used to be a white-knuckle experience. Now it's just another week — because we know Sola has our back."
- Sofia Reyes
/ Head of Platform Engineering
