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With over 180 stores, Dunelm is the UK’s leading home furnishings retailer. The technology team at Dunelm needs to process 110k of transactions per day, coming from more than 1600 tills across the country. How do they make sure those transactions are completed? How do they manage downtime? How do they know if a transaction has been completed locally when there are networking issues? The biggest hurdle that the team had to overcome is the fact that the tills are running a third-party software, reducing the options to instrument them. When something failed, it was discovered a few days later, making it harder for the finance to reconcile those transactions. At Datadog Summit London 2024, Usman Niazi, Head of SRE at Dunelm, covered how they built a system that allowed them to collect the transactions at the edge and monitor them, so failures were discovered and solved in a timely manner. He explained the different phases of the project, from an initial system that solved the most urgent issues, to the actual one, with SLOs in place to prevent degradation.