Alma is a French fintech company founded in 2019 that provides Buy Now Pay Later payment solutions. With over 350 employees and millions of transactions processed, their infrastructure reliability is mission-critical.
We spoke with Fabrice Gregoire, Site Reliability Engineer on Alma's platform team, about how Hyperping serves as their monitoring safety net, ensuring they're never blind to outages, even when primary monitoring tools fail.
Key takeaways: Redundant monitoring that pays for itself
"Hyperping's reputation in our company is that it's more reactive than Datadog. We usually get notifications from Hyperping before Datadog."
What Hyperping enables Alma to do:
- Monitor their monitoring: Track Datadog's status page to know immediately if their primary tool goes down
- Redundant alerting: Double notifications on critical components ensure nothing slips through the cracks
- Cost-effective checks: Fixed pricing vs Datadog's expensive per-check model
- Partner surveillance: Keep tabs on third-party services their platform depends on
When Datadog goes down, Hyperping takes over
"Hyperping is useful for us as a fallback and a kind of safeguard, a lighter backup monitoring solution. It allows us to track Datadog's status and see if Datadog goes down."
Alma runs their infrastructure monitoring primarily through Datadog, a comprehensive but complex solution. But what happens when your monitoring system itself fails?
This is not hypothetical for a company processing financial transactions. Even a few minutes of blindness to system issues can create meaningful operational risk.
That's where Hyperping comes in. Fabrice and his team use it to:
- Monitor Datadog's status page for outages
- Provide redundant checks on public-facing services
- Track partner and vendor uptime
- Create a safety net that operates independently of their main stack
"We monitor Datadog's status page through Hyperping. That's how we know quickly when Datadog is down."
Faster alerts, better peace of mind
"When there's a problem with Datadog, we generally see it, but having an alert that notifies us means we gain a few minutes to be more present."
The difference between immediate awareness and delayed awareness is substantial for teams managing financial infrastructure.
"We get the information from Hyperping first, then from Datadog, which leads people to say 'Hyperping is more reactive'. That's what we appreciate, it's more reactive."
This early warning layer does not replace Datadog. It ensures Alma's SRE team is not caught off guard when speed matters most.
Fixed pricing that makes sense at scale
"Datadog charges per check. You [Hyperping] have a package, that's better. Pay per use is annoying and expensive."
Datadog's uptime checks can become expensive as check counts and locations grow. Hyperping's fixed pricing gives Alma predictable economics for backup monitoring.
- Run redundant checks without worrying about per-use costs
- Scale coverage predictably
- Get peace of mind without budget surprises
Support that feels personal
"I appreciate the closeness we have with Leo, especially in chat where he's responsive. I sell this internally by saying that if we have features or needs, we could probably easily report them."
For Fabrice, one underrated advantage is direct access to the team behind the product, especially when advocating tooling decisions internally.
The bottom line: A lightweight safety net for serious infrastructure
Alma's approach is pragmatic. They are not replacing their primary monitoring stack, they are adding a reliable fallback when that stack is unavailable.
For SRE teams running critical infrastructure, the core question is not only whether your primary monitoring tool is powerful. It is whether you have a plan for when it fails.
Hyperping fills that gap: lightweight, fast, cost-effective, and independent from the systems it protects.
