FocalPoint
FocalPoint
FocalPoint is a payment infrastructure provider processing over $2B annually for 3,000+ online merchants across North America.
Insights from
Rachel Kim
VP of Engineering
How FocalPoint cut incident response time by 92%.
When a payment processor goes down, every second costs real money. FocalPoint uses Sola to catch outages before their merchants ever notice.
"We used to find out about outages from angry merchants calling in. Now Sola wakes the right engineer before the first customer notices a failed checkout."
- Rachel Kim
/ VP of Engineering
Challenge
FocalPoint's engineering team was flying blind. Outages were discovered through merchant support tickets, not internal monitoring — and by the time anyone knew there was a problem, the damage was already done.
Processing $2B+ in annual transactions across 3,000 merchants means there's no such thing as a minor outage. But FocalPoint's legacy monitoring stack was built for a simpler era — static thresholds, slow polling, and email alerts that routinely went unnoticed. Critical payment endpoints could fail for 20–30 minutes before a senior engineer even heard about it. The team wasn't reactive by choice. They simply had no reliable signal to act on.
Solution
FocalPoint deployed Sola across their full payments infrastructure in under a day. From that moment forward, every failure had a name, a timestamp, and an owner.
Sola now monitors FocalPoint's API endpoints, webhook processors, and third-party payment rails at 45-second intervals from 12 global regions. When latency spikes or a status code goes wrong, the right on-call engineer is paged within seconds — with full diagnostic context attached. Escalation policies route critical payment failures directly to senior staff, while lower-severity issues follow standard on-call rotation. The team also configured Sola's public status page to automatically reflect live service health, reducing inbound support volume during incidents.
Results
FocalPoint's engineering team no longer waits for merchants to report problems. Sola's early detection gives them the confidence to move fast without the fear of missing something critical.
Incident response time cut from 20+ minutes to under 2 minutes
92% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR)
Zero merchant-reported outages since Sola deployment
On-call fatigue reduced through smarter alert routing and escalation policies
Public status page now updated automatically during incidents
"Sola paid for itself in the first week. The first outage it caught would have cost us six figures if it had gone undetected for another hour."
- Rachel Kim
/ VP of Engineering
