How Key Data Slashed Debugging Time and Ramped Up Innovation Velocity
Learn how Key Data used PlayerZero’s AI-driven PR agent and session replay to accelerate development, streamline QA, and resolve customer issues in minutes. Highlights experienced by engineers include:
Narrowed issue replication from weeks to minutes
Increased feature velocity by freeing up developer time
Brought down the bug backlog and improved customer experience
“Before PlayerZero, we used to spend hours chasing down bugs. PlayerZero relieved us of this burden, enabling us to focus on innovation and value-adding activities, such as shipping new features.” — Cruz Burgos, Senior Developer, Key Data
About
Key Data delivers real-time performance analytics and visualization tools for short-term rental businesses. Founded in 2018, the company has raised over $12.4 million in funding and earned multiple awards and industry honors, including ranking in the top 1000 on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list, and two 2025 Shortyz Awards recognizing excellence in short-term rental data solutions.
Key Data’s technology stack combines Next.js and React for its front end, leveraging Ant Design and Tailwind CSS for UI development, while its robust back end is built on .NET (C#) and powered by Microsoft Azure, utilizing Azure DevOps pipelines and a NoSQL database to support advanced data visualizations and seamless product delivery.
Challenge
Eliminating weeks of debugging and missed opportunities
As Key Data’s platform expanded to serve more users and offer a broader range of services, the team faced mounting complexity. Every new feature, integration, and dependency increased the challenge of keeping the system reliable and responsive to customer needs.
Cruz Burgos, Key Data’s Senior Developer, saw the effects firsthand. The team’s toolkit — error monitoring platforms, performance tracking, and unit tests — effectively caught surface-level problems, but customer-reported bugs were a different story. With developers unable to reliably reproduce them or trace their root causes, tickets piled up in the backlog for weeks, delaying feature launches, increasing the risk of customer dissatisfaction, and slowing engineering cycles.
To meet growing demands and expectations, Key Data’s engineering team needed a more effective way to diagnose, reproduce, and resolve issues without sacrificing quality. The team began searching for a solution that would provide robust session context to help engineers move beyond guesswork and tackle problems with greater insight.
That’s when they discovered PlayerZero, which provided exactly what their team needed to reproduce complex customer issues and eliminate the bottleneck of manual code reviews.
“The hardest part was trying to replicate issues. Sometimes it took weeks, and some bugs just sat in the backlog because we couldn’t figure out what triggered them or how to replicate.”
Solution
AI-powered code understanding and real-time session replay
Backed by hands-on support from PlayerZero, Key Data smoothly embedded PlayerZero into their existing Microsoft Azure-powered stack with minimal setup time — 10 minutes for the UI and about an hour for backend setup.
The impact was immediate. PlayerZero’s AI-powered PR agent surfaces issues automatically at the point of code submission, eliminating the need for manual reviews. Cruz and his team now get rapid, detailed insights into pull request changes. As a result, the team ramped up velocity without sacrificing quality — from one release a week to multiple deployments. PR throughput increased significantly, with engineers using PlayerZero’s contextual chat to query code changes, assess potential risks, and understand unfamiliar codebases in minutes.
PlayerZero's impact extends beyond PR reviews. Developers no longer spend time sifting through logs, reproducing edge-case bugs, or triaging customer problems with limited context. With PlayerZero’s full-stack session replay, UI clicks, console logs, and network requests are unified in real time. This holistic view allows for quick, accurate debugging, performance monitoring, and issue diagnosis — helping teams identify root causes that previously took weeks to uncover.
Beyond agentic debugging, PlayerZero improves support, QA, and engineering workflows. Support teams resolve issues with full-context traces, reducing engineering escalations. Engineers automated the detection of UI updates triggered by API changes, speeding adaptation and reducing the testing burden. This automation, when combined with AI tools like Claude and Cursor, streamlines communication between teams.
The benefits also extended to onboarding new hires. Now, team members can quickly get up to speed using session link sharing, interactive walkthroughs, and detailed visualizations that map user and system behavior.
With PlayerZero embedded across their development lifecycle, Key Data’s team freed up significant engineering capacity, shifting their focus from reactive issue resolution to high-value product delivery.
“The ability to talk to PlayerZero’s AI agent about a PR or bug and get real answers immediately was the tipping point. Now we’re using it full-time across our DevOps pipeline.”
Results
Accelerated release velocity and faster customer issue resolution
With PlayerZero, Key Data transformed engineering efficiency into an engine for growth — shipping features faster, driving customer retention, and positioning the business to build at scale.
The team’s excitement around new PlayerZero features — like code simulations for proactive user flow testing — signals ongoing progress in further automating and streamlining their software development processes.
