How to Fine-Tune Application Performance With Observability Tools

How to Stay One Step Ahead of Problems with Apps

To ensure reliable uptime, Westgate hosts its guest mobile app on multiple redundant virtual machines. However, this redundancy becomes pointless if IT professionals can’t quickly see when one of the hosts goes down.

“Without SolarWinds, we wouldn’t know that a host was down unless somebody manually checked, because the app is still going to be up,” Miguel says. “That’s where SolarWinds helps us a lot. When something goes down, we’re already ahead of it, without the issue even causing an outage.”

Miguel designed Westgate’s NOC, and he says he opted for SolarWinds in large part because of his previous positive experiences with the vendor’s solutions.

“For me, the biggest things are user-friendliness and the ability to customize,” Miguel says. “That’s made it so much easier for me to train new people coming in.”

In addition to the guest mobile app, Westgate uses SolarWinds to monitor its employee-facing applications and the Wi-Fi networks at its resorts. Miguel notes that Wi-Fi has become even more important thanks to the rise of remote work, with guests often joining online meetings from their hotel rooms.

“We can quickly see from one window if we’re experiencing any latency or packet loss,” Miguel says. “The moment we see an issue, we can get ahead of it.”

How to Get App Performance Data

For Kennedy Industries, which manages supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for water treatment plants in Michigan, effective app observability can help catch issues early enough to ensure that critical infrastructure stays up and running.

“We work with more than 70 municipalities, each of which has a number of devices that connect to firewalls and networking equipment,” says Mitchell Sobel, IT administrator for Kennedy Industries. “We’ve got all of these facilities: water treatment plants, water towers and pump stations. How do you keep an eye on all of it? How do you know when something goes wrong? When it comes to critical infrastructure, you really have to stay on top of things.”

Kennedy Industries uses PRTG, a network monitoring tool from Paessler, to enable visibility into the connected physical assets the organization manages as well as into its customer-facing application, which municipal managers use to track their infrastructure. Sobel says the platform not only gives infrastructure managers the peace of mind that comes with real-time visibility, but it also provides invaluable data that helps inform upgrades to both physical assets and IT infrastructure.

“Our app lets customers see how their pump stations are performing while they’re at home having dinner, and if anything goes wrong, it will send alerts to them immediately,” Sobel says. “Then we use PRTG to monitor how the app is running — things like whether CPU usage is getting too high, whether RAM usage is a little too high, if our hard drives are getting full. So, we know when we need to take action and when it’s time for upgrades.”

In fact, Sobel says, data from PRTG helped IT leaders at Kennedy Industries make the case that the company needed to procure more data center resources from its colocation provider.

“It was a very easy conversation, because we had all that great data,” Sobel says.

How App Observability Improves Customer Service

FreedomPay is one of the world’s leading payment services companies. When someone swipes a credit card with one of its customers, FreedomPay must support a response time under one second, ensuring that payments are processed without delay. But until recently, the company was supporting about half a dozen observability tools, making it challenging for IT professionals to hunt down and remediate the source of bottlenecks.

In summer 2022, FreedomPay began consolidating on Dynatrace Grail, which offers analytics powered by artificial intelligence for observability, security and business data.

“It’s solved some pretty major problems for us,” says Mark Tomlinson, director of observability and performance. “Having one tool gave us the ability to collaborate and break down silos.”

The observability enabled by Dynatrace is necessary, Tomlinson says, to support FreedomPay’s point-of-sale and e-commerce applications, as well as its customer-facing app that lets merchants manage their settings, access and reporting. The tool has also enhanced the company’s customer service, as FreedomPay representatives can use Dynatrace to instantly pull up observability records for specific merchants.

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“When we open a call, we can bring up their session instead of telling them we’ll look into it and get back to them,” Tomlinson says. “That’s a huge win.”

Despite the benefits of consolidation, Tomlinson says, it can be a challenge to motivate users to abandon their preferred observability solutions. “We had five or six different tools, and people loved those tools,” he says. “Those tools helped them get their jobs done, and people had worked out ways to get the data they needed. So, the mental transition is the biggest part. We even modeled some of our custom Dynatrace dashboards to look like the tools we were replacing.”

As a result, the company has seen adoption increase by 10 percent or more most months, he says: “Beyond just the engineering staff, we now see our account managers using Dynatrace more and more. The adoption has taken off like crazy.”