One of the greatest benefits of my job is the first-hand insight I gain about our customers’ experiences with AppDynamics. I have the privilege of understanding the impact their technical challenges have on their business execution and how AppDynamics can help them reach their optimal application performance.
Most recently, Davide Franzino, ITS Service Technical Manager at ING Direct, shared with us their challenges and how AppDynamics has helped them meet their goals as a team. ING is a global financial institution offering banking, investments, life insurance, and retirement services to a broad customer base. Davide is responsible for managing Quality of Service and supporting Incident and Problem Management. While he has no team to manage, he works closely with the Operations and Application Support teams.
Initially, ING implemented Dell’s Foglight in 2011 as their system monitoring and APM solution. After the initial rollout of the Foglight product, they immediately began to experience challenges with the solution not meeting their complex needs. While Foglight met their basic requirements, it failed to provide value beyond simple use-cases. Specifically, ING required capabilities only offered by a complete APM solution.
Soon after that, ING adopted AppDynamics and began to experience positive results immediately. By 2014, they had AppDynamics deployed across their entire production environments, and soon switched off Foglight entirely. The Business Transactions paradigm provided by AppDynamics gave the ING team an entirely new perspective on how to view requests across their distributed system. Like most larger enterprise applications, ING’s architecture has evolved into a relatively large and complex environment to meet the demands of their customers.
Not only did AppDynamics help provide the insight necessary to diagnose performance issues quickly, but it also helped the ING team correlate software performance metrics to their business impact. Multiple teams can now collaborate internally using the AppDynamics platform to extract value and measure business impact. The flowmap image below is a glimpse at the scale of their SOA and network of distributed tiers.
In addition to providing value for the development and operations teams, AppDynamics allows the ING marketing team to extract valuable metrics pertaining to their visitors. This new custom dashboard allows the marketing department to understand how potential new users are converted into ING customers. Specifically, this custom dashboard highlights the End User Response time for specific key business transactions and provides insight on any deviation on critical transactions from their normal healthy baselines.
Because of AppDynamics, there now exists collaboration among the development, operations, business, and marketing teams at ING to take part in a new era of sophisticated application intelligence with AppDynamics.
