Case Study: Loveholidays reduces MTTD and boosts conversion with Buoyant’s Linkerd

Reducing MTTD and increasing observability with Linkerd at loveholidays

Loveholidays, a fast-growing UK and Ireland online travel agency, needed a better way to monitor a highly diverse microservices environment and spot regressions quickly. With hundreds of services built in multiple languages and inconsistent team-built dashboards, it was difficult to compare performance across applications, increasing incident mean time to discovery (MTTD) and risking customer conversion losses from slow search responses.

Buoyant’s Linkerd service mesh gave loveholidays a uniform layer of observability across services, with consistent golden metrics, mTLS, tap, retries, service-level routing data, and support for canary analysis and rollbacks. The team rolled it out gradually to production and used the resulting metrics to catch hundreds of failed deployments, reduce MTTD and response times, and improve search performance enough to drive a 2.61% increase in conversion in an A/B test.

Loveholidays

Dan Williams

Senior Infrastructure Engineer