Case Study retail

Michael Hill
Unified Monitoring and Diagnostics

A cross-system view of production issues

Michael Hill International Limited

Michael Hill International Limited operates a retail jewelry chain of more than 300 stores in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The Michael Hill story began in 1979 when Sir Michael and his wife Christine opened their first store in the New Zealand town of Whangarei, some 160 kilometres north of Auckland.

Software Architect Jason Hess tells how Seq has changed application development and operations at Michael Hill:

“We use Seq for centralized logs for issue investigation. With our systems becoming more distributed we’ve found using Seq gives us a unified, cross-system view of production issues.

“Because logging to Seq is simple and useful for developers, it means we’re adding extensive logging to our systems. We are able to push code more frequently into production because we’re able to identify issues quickly.”

Michael Hill International Limited operates a retail jewelry chain of over 300 Michael Hill stores in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

300+ retail locations | 2,600+ employees

Seq’s straightforward local installation means monitoring and diagnostics receive investment earlier in the development process.

“We also use Seq during development and testing activities. Our developers install Seq locally, and all of our projects log to the local Seq instance by default, so our team can quickly see the same logs they see in production during their local development.

“Seq’s built-in HTTP API has also come in handy for logging from non-.NET components in our environment. We use Serilog predominantly for logging, but the HTTP API has let us connect everything else.”

Datalust would like to thank Michael Hill International and Jason Hess for their kind assistance with this case study.