Camis Eliminates Scraper Bots, Saves Time, & Reduces Costs With DataDome

The Problem: Site Slowdowns & Inflated Hosting Costs

“Hey, your service is a bit slow today.” The first hint of malicious activity on Camis’ park management and reservation solution came from its users.

Though their typical metrics looked normal, when they started to dig deeper, Camis’ technical team found some odd recurring patterns. They quickly suspected the reason was scraper bots, but how could they know exactly? While Camis’ infrastructure includes web application firewalls and other basic bot blocking tools, none of these security measures seemed to really address what was becoming a growing concern as the season progressed. Manual mitigation was necessary, but proved both time-consuming and ineffective.

“The main issue with previous security solutions we had in place is that they’re not dynamically learning,” comments Marc Gardiner, Director of Software Engineering. “Bad actors are constantly evolving, and we don’t have the resources to meet that with manpower.”

While actual downtime was never a real threat, the slowdowns were troublesome enough. The additional volume of traffic was also driving up Camis’ hosting costs.

The Solution: Advanced Bot Detection, Solid Partnership

The task of finding a more sustainable solution fell on Michael Peto, Principal Software Engineer at Camis.

“We looked into several different vendors, and one of the things we really liked about DataDome was the flexibility in terms of plan sizes and pricing,” he explains. “I was also interested in the number of signals that DataDome looks at in terms of determining whether a visitor is a human or a bot. Obviously, much of the technology is proprietary and direct comparison is difficult, but I did research different fingerprinting techniques and other ways to detect bots, and it was good to see that DataDome uses a wide variety of those techniques.”

Another key selection criterion was the ease of installation. While the initial implementation of the DataDome .NET module was smooth and simple, the team ran into some unexpected performance issues as they started to scale. 

“It was a bit of a rocky start, but we’ve had rocky starts with all kinds of vendors,” Marc Gardiner comments. “Most of the time, you just get what you get. The difference with DataDome was that we were able to partner on the solution. We worked closely with the development and support teams, and participated in testing new versions of the module. It’s a healthy relationship, and we were able to turn those initial hurdles into something positive.”

The Results: Lower Costs, Confident Customers

While the Camis team had been well aware that they had undesirable traffic, they had not suspected the real volume that the DataDome dashboard revealed. 

“I was definitely surprised by the sheer amount of requests being sent to our servers,” Michael observes. “We obviously knew that there was some bad traffic, just from the load on our servers, but we didn’t realize there was that much.”

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the traffic completely reshaped itself when the DataDome protection was activated. Some bots changed their strategy, but the majority seemed to just give up. 

“There’s been a huge decrease in bot traffic, from surprisingly high numbers to basically nothing. That means we’re saving on hosting costs,” Michael confirms. “It’s also just really nice to know that things our users were worried about, like denial of inventory or malicious use of the booking system, are no longer possible at scale. Knowing that we’re addressing the issue and have that security in place gives our customers peace of mind.”

“We never had any solid proof that denial of inventory was actually happening, it was just suspicions and hearsay,” adds Marc. “But because we’re in a market where ticket scalping happens for real, being able to say that we have a service in place to prevent or mitigate such things helps give end users confidence that the system is fair.” 

“All our clients are government entities providing very public-facing services. To be able to say that the reservation service for this jurisdiction is protected from bots, so nobody will be cheated, is very important,” he concludes.