How we monitor our systems to ensure high performance and reliability..

Every day we process vast quantities of data from hundreds of sources, process it and send it out to many more destinations. Real estate data is the core of the products Agentpoint offers and is vitally important for our client’s businesses that it is processed and sent to where it needs to go quickly and accurately.

The quantity of data we handle is surprisingly large. Every day we import around 10,000 files from third parties containing updates for up to 50,000 properties. This all gets processed in to our central database in addition to our clients who don’t import their data from a third party CRM and instead enter  updates directly in to PropertyHub. This data then has to be sent out to client’s websites and all the real estate portals in a timely manner. Typically this whole process takes between 5 to 10 minutes and we are constantly looking for ways to decrease the amount of time it takes to process.

The systems that handle all this data are custom made for the job developed over many years and must be extremely reliable. They run on their own servers dedicated to processing the quantity of data so nothing else can affect the system. We collect statistics from everything in real time and if anything stops performing as expected alerts are sent to let us know there might be something wrong. Most of our systems are now self healing which means in the rare case that we do have a problem, once the problem is removed the system will automatically ensure corrected information gets sent everywhere it needs to be sent.

We even keep very close statistics on the PropertyHub API which some of our clients use to use their data in advanced, specialised or highly custom ways which otherwise couldn’t be possible otherwise. Some people have built their own real estate applications using our API, generate their own internal reports or create highly specialised websites using the API as a data source. Every aspect of our systems has to be operating consistently and quickly so the API’s response time is monitored. We can observe our recorded statistics over any time period to find patterns and isolate problems more effectively.

All these systems are managed by our Property Data team who monitor the systems, configure and set up new data feeds and debug issues in the help desk. You likely have already had contact with one of the team at some point such as myself (Nick), Sherwin, Andres or Ivan and they use their dedicated set of diagnostics tools to try and resolve any issues you have quickly.

So the next time you update one of your listings, you can think about what goes in to ensuring it goes where you expect it to go. It’s not quite as simple as clicking the ‘Update Property’ button!