There is a common theme among the stories told by our new enterprise customers freshly adopting our AppDynamics platform. As their application grows in scale to meet their customer demands, their time to diagnose performance issues were painfully increasing, too. Operations and development teams slowly seemed to come to accept an untrue reality that solving performance issues are an inevitable and painful part of large-scale software infrastructure.
Luckily, this belief could not be further from the truth, and we prove that time and time again with each new customer we have onboard! I love hearing the excitement from our customers as they share with me their stories about how their jobs have become exponentially easier since adopting AppDynamics. Most recently, I had the pleasure to sit down and chat about the experiences of one of our newest customers: Autotrader.
I spoke with Morgan White, an Application Engineer at Autotrader, to pick his brain on what caused them to switch to AppDynamics. For starters, I was not surprised to learn about the scale of their environment growing in complexity and size in an attempt to meet the demands of their traffic. Specifically, they applied decoupling techniques to build up a true service-oriented architecture as they isolated responsibilities into various internal services.
Unfortunately, as Autotrader’s architecture became more distributed, the amount of monitoring tools increased. Morgan filled me in on the frustration of having an influx of tools being used by various teams, including development and operations. This is a common issue among companies such as Autotrader—multiple tools, siloed logs and reports, and disconnect among different teams within an organization. Luckily, the AppDynamics platform was pivotal in helping Autotrader solve all their performance pain points.
Qualifying AppDynamics versus the competition was a clear choice for Morgan and his colleagues. AppDynamics provided Autotrader an APM tool that consolidates all the various aspects of application performance monitoring into a single unified and easier tool than the competition. Morgan shared with me a particular anecdote involving him and his team experiencing excessive 400 errors and failing to pinpoint their root cause. By using AppDynamics, Morgan was able to locate the specific business transaction throwing the excess errors, diagnosed the problem, and immediately pushed a fix into production—all within the same day. I never grow tired of hearing use cases such as this from our customer testimonials.
Make no mistake, though: Using AppDynamics to solve performance issues is just half the battle. Brian Nivens, a Senior Integration Engineer at Autotrader, glowingly spoke about the advantage of avoiding potential issues by using AppDynamics’ alerting and release comparison features. By creating specific health rules, Brian and his team are immediately alerted when a problem arose and manage to fix it quickly before becoming exposed to a large percentage of customers. Further, Brian loves being able to compare the KPIs among various deployments to ensure the customer base has an optimal experience as the development and operations team continuously deploy new software upgrades.
I am proud to say that AppDynamics has helped multiple teams at Autotrader continue to focus on their core business and do what they do best: helping millions of customers find the vehicles of their dreams. I invite you also to come and explore what AppDynamics can do you for so that you too can stop worrying about software performance issues and regain your focus on what you also do best!
This post was written by Hannah Current, Customer Marketing Manager at AppDynamics, & originally appeared on the AppDynamics blog.