Dynatrace

Riyad Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in Saudi Arabia, embarked on a significant business transformation aimed at enhancing the digital banking experience for its customers. To support this initiative, the bank built a private cloud environment using Red Hat OpenShift, complying with local banking legislation that prohibits the use of public cloud services. As part of this transformation, Riyad Bank began migrating applications to a microservices and container-based architecture to maximize the value of its private cloud environment. This transition would enable the bank to innovate faster, create new digital banking solutions, and build a stronger competitive advantage. However, the shift to a cloud-native environment introduced significant new complexity, making it more challenging to deliver seamless digital banking experiences. The bank needed to maintain end-to-end observability into its applications to identify and resolve problems quickly, ensuring the best possible experiences for its customers.

Spirit Airlines, a major airline operator with over 200 aircraft and serving more than 90 destinations, was looking to expand its network and enhance its customer experience. The airline's technology team manages several mission-critical applications that power the customer experience and support internal operations. These include various cloud-based online and mobile commercial applications that support customer self-service options, from booking flights and managing trips to self-check-in and baggage-tag printing. The team also oversees operational applications used to manage the fleet and maintenance crews. The challenge was to resolve issues in these applications quickly, using capabilities beyond traditional eyes-on-screen monitoring procedures. They also needed increased visibility into the customer journey and the third-party applications integrated with its services.

TSB Bank, the seventh largest retail bank in the UK, was seeking to expand its digital services to its over five million customers. The bank had built a modern banking platform on AWS, IBM Cloud, and BT Cloud to support customers across all key channels, including mobile, where 90% of servicing transactions are completed and over 70% of sales are done. However, the transition to a dynamic multicloud architecture introduced rising complexity across its IT environment. To manage customer expectations and provide best-in-class banking experiences, TSB needed a new approach to monitoring. The bank required an all-in-one solution that could provide full-stack observability into its multicloud environment, offering a single source of truth around customer experience.

XXXLutz, Europe’s second largest furniture retailer, was striving to deliver flawless omnichannel experiences to its customers. The retailer had established its digital branch several years ago, which had grown quickly and become a significant revenue contributor alongside its brick-and-mortar stores. However, with the rapid expansion and brand acquisition, the company had built up a complex and distributed technology ecosystem supporting front-end and back-end processes, including omni-channel customer journeys. The applications underpinning XXXLutz’s omnichannel customer experiences spanned multiple platforms and a multicloud and Kubernetes architecture. This complex stack, coupled with the retailer’s rapid growth, created silos across the organization, where different teams managed different applications and types of infrastructure with disparate tools. This fragmented approach made it difficult to get end-to-end visibility of customer journeys or understand how the systems supporting them were interconnected. Without this insight, it was challenging to identify the root-cause of issues in customer journeys, which impacted conversions and put XXXLutz’s revenue and customer loyalty at risk.

As one of North America’s largest banks, BMO has adopted a digital first strategy to power financial progress and continually meet the needs of its customers in a rapidly evolving market. The strategy is centered around technology-led innovation that delivers reimagined banking services and drives best-in-class customer experiences while optimizing operating efficiencies. To support this, BMO relies on a hybrid technology stack spanning on-premises data centers and public cloud services. However, traditional approaches to log analytics would make it difficult to access timely insights and create a productivity drain due to the reliance on time-consuming manual processes. BMO wanted to unlock real-time insights from the enormous volume and variety of observability data being produced across this dynamic and distributed technology stack.

Skyworks, a high-performance semiconductor manufacturer, operates in a complex, multicloud and hybrid technology environment. The company has a footprint in every major cloud services platform, as well as its own on-premises data centers. This complexity made it difficult for Skyworks to obtain an end-to-end view across its applications. As the demand for wireless connectivity continues to grow, Skyworks needed to ensure it was ready to meet the needs of its customers and the world they connect as they constantly evolve. To do this, the company needed to increase its investments in new and emerging technologies such as 5G and improve its manufacturing and engineering processes through automation. However, to maximize the impact of its investments in automation, Skyworks needed a modern observability solution that could reveal how its applications integrate with one another and provide precise answers about how they can be optimized and kept secure.

Clario, a rapidly growing company in the healthcare industry, found itself grappling with an increasingly complex, hybrid environment due to a series of acquisitions. Each acquisition came with its own technology stack and toolchain, adding to the complexity of the existing legacy systems and cloud platforms. The situation was further complicated as Clario began migrating towards a cloud native architecture running on Kubernetes, with plans to transition these workloads to AWS. The use of disparate monitoring tools to manage IT performance resulted in a lack of observability across all business departments and IT environments. This made it challenging to identify, understand, and resolve any anomalies or performance issues promptly, thereby hindering innovation and optimization of user experiences. Clario recognized the need to standardize its CI/CD processes and consolidate its monitoring and management solutions into a single DevOps toolchain.

Dubai Customs, a leading customs administration globally, was facing challenges in managing the performance and availability of its digital services. The organization relied on a variety of legacy monitoring solutions, many of which were native to its infrastructure spanning traditional data center and private cloud environments. Development teams used their preferred testing tools to ensure new builds met the required standards before being released to production. This fragmented approach resulted in delays to innovation and performance blind spots, often leaving Dubai Customs unaware of problems until customers reported them. A key concern was the performance of Mirsal, a collection of mission-critical applications used to process the movement of goods in and out of Dubai. Any failure in these applications could lead to long delays and tailbacks at the border, potentially causing commodities with a limited shelf-life to spoil.

loanDepot, one of the largest non-bank mortgage lenders in the U.S., has been successful due to its customer-centric loans platform that digitally captures and validates applicant's banking and asset documents and information. This technology-driven transformation has enabled the company to create a revolutionary digital-first approach, simplifying and speeding up transactions. However, as loanDepot's digital offerings grew, its infrastructure and operations became more complex. The company needed a way to move to a more scalable hybrid cloud technology stack, integrate core systems, and deliver new products faster, without affecting the customer experience. The challenge was to maintain its competitive advantage by continually optimizing the customer experience.

Migros Bank, a Swiss bank with over a million customers, was founded on the principle of providing fast, easy, and human banking. As the market became more digitalized, the bank aimed to bring more of its customers online while maintaining its values by offering reliable and intuitive digital banking services. These services were powered by applications built on a hybrid technology stack, including an on-premises private cloud environment running on Kubernetes and RedHat OpenShift, as well as a legacy mainframe. The complexity of this hybrid technology stack made it challenging for Migros Bank to understand how backend changes impacted front-end experiences on its digital banking platforms, including critical processes such as customer onboarding and e-banking. The bank's services relied on multiple third-party applications and its own in-house software, but these remained a 'black box.' Migros Bank needed end-to-end visibility across its entire application stack for effective collaboration internally and with external suppliers to find solutions when problems arose.

Pasco County, Florida, with a goal of becoming the premier county in the state, aimed to deliver services that exceed customer expectations, build trust, inspire confidence, and promote accountability. With a growing population of digitally savvy citizens, it was crucial to ensure that the county’s digital services were world-class, reliable, and resilient. However, as the county continued to digitize its services, it faced an increased risk from cybersecurity threats. The county needed to adopt measures to ensure the integrity of its systems and protect sensitive citizen data. Pasco County also needed to modernize its internal operations and security processes. Teams previously worked in silos with their own toolsets, leading to blind spots and lack of effective collaboration. They also relied on complex manual processes, which increased the risk of problems that could impact citizen experiences and allow vulnerabilities to leave systems exposed. This made it more difficult to ensure services were available 24/7, hindering Pasco County’s mission and impacting its ability to build trust and enhance the agency’s reputation amongst constituents.

USI Insurance Services, a provider of tailored insurance services, was facing challenges in maintaining the security of its sensitive customer data and delivering better end-user experiences. The company's teams were relying on time-consuming manual processes to scan for vulnerabilities in their home-grown and third-party solutions, including the USI ONE platform. These scans were static and focused on pre-production, making it easy for newly discovered vulnerabilities to go undetected in production environments until the next scheduled scan. It was also difficult to spot vulnerabilities within some third-party applications, which remained a ‘black box’ for USI’s teams. In addition to these security challenges, USI also experienced application performance issues that were affecting end-users, and teams were losing valuable hours of productivity.

Vivint, a leading smart home and automation company, was facing challenges in maintaining flawless technology and software systems for its 1.9 million customers. The company's technology is deeply integrated into the lives of its customers, providing safety and automation services. Any system outage could potentially risk the safety of its customers, tarnish the brand reputation, and result in customer loss. In a rapidly changing technological world, Vivint needed to accelerate its innovation to maintain its competitive edge and bring new features to the market faster without compromising the customer experience. However, the company's existing monitoring solution was unable to provide the depth of visibility required to understand the root cause of problems impacting the customer experience in a timely manner. Vivint needed to enhance observability across its technology and software ecosystem to understand how its customers were interacting with its products and where improvements were needed.

Western Governors University (WGU), a U.S.-based online university, is dedicated to making higher education as accessible as possible for a diverse range of students. These students require a seamless experience every time they log in to a WGU system, whether it's to study, access a course, or take an assessment. Any disruption can impact their studies, motivation, and grades. The performance and availability of WGU’s e-learning platforms, especially during peak times ahead of an assessment, are therefore crucial. These platforms are built on a dynamic cloud-based architecture, to enable greater agility and rapid innovation. However, with a constantly changing technology stack, the WGU team found it challenging to get a 360-degree view of all its applications or understand the critical dependencies across its heterogenous environment. They needed end-to-end observability across its applications and infrastructure to identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible, to maintain seamless student experiences.

Arriva, a leading provider of bus transport in the UK, recognized the importance of digital channels for customers' travel needs. They aimed to create an omnichannel experience, allowing customers to purchase tickets and plan their journeys in various ways. During the pandemic, Arriva accelerated the launch of its new app and website to keep customers moving safely and make digital the core of their travel experience. However, they faced a challenge in gaining visibility into the applications' front end to discover problems in real time and find precise solutions. Traditional monitoring solutions couldn't provide insights into the real-user experience, making it difficult to identify issues that were affecting conversions through the website.

BT, the UK's largest mobile and fixed broadband provider, faced significant challenges as it expanded its consumer division with the integration of EE. The drive to develop new mobile services for customers necessitated deep visibility into their constantly evolving IT environment. The BT Digital team was determined to rapidly identify and rectify problems, ensuring the availability and stability of crucial EE services. The challenge was to reduce outage times and digital incidents, which were impacting the customer experience and the EE brand's bottom line. A one-second impact on the customer could result in a 7% reduction in conversion rate, highlighting the critical need for efficient problem resolution and stable service delivery.

Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the United States, embarked on an aggressive digital transformation about five years ago to enhance its limited digital presence. This transformation led to a shift to a hybrid, multicloud environment, incorporating Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and on-premises infrastructure. Consequently, Kroger's IT stack became increasingly dynamic and complex, making it challenging to monitor and manage. The company identified a need for greater observability into its environment to ensure its digital teams could access the insights they needed to deliver seamless digital experiences to customers. Additionally, Kroger's monitoring team, known as the 'Captain America Truth and Justice' team, sought to establish a common language for problem resolution to expedite the process.

Photobox, Europe’s largest digital personalized printing company, faced a significant challenge in monitoring its diverse technology stack. The company relied on ten different monitoring and logging solutions across its stack, and teams had to manually check each of them to understand the end-to-end customer journey. Managing so many disparate solutions had become humanly impossible and costly to maintain, delivering little value. To understand an end-to-end flow, an engineer would have to look across multiple dashboards and manually build out a journey for a particular set of challenges. This process required about three or four hours of work to diagnose problems. Photobox wanted an all-in-one monitoring solution that could reduce that to just minutes by providing precise, actionable answers in one place, to help teams make faster, more data-driven decisions to optimize customer experiences.

Saxo Bank, a Danish bank specializing in online trading and investment, aimed to offer a market-leading trading platform that best supports the needs of individual investors as well as white-label partners, such as banks and management firms. Its platform connects to global stock markets in London, New York, and Tokyo, handling more than 800,000 different prices per second. To enable the high speed, low latency its platform needed, Saxo Bank built a fully on-premises IT stack, running on Multicast and Windows technology. However, to drive greater digital agility, it began to migrate towards a microservices and containerized architecture on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Stack (AKS), in an on-premises private cloud. This migration brought significant complexity to its environment. The bank needed a single solution that could monitor across all technologies, reduce alert storms, and cut resolution times.

Soldo, a leading spend management platform in Europe, offers organizations a simple, automated way to delegate, control, and track expenses for employees and departments. It helps finance teams manage budgets with real-time visibility over company-wide spending. To accomplish this, Soldo requires maximum uptime and performance of its software so customers can access it from anywhere and at any time. Its platform is built on a complex cloud-native technology stack, running in AWS and leveraging a Kubernetes-based architecture. Soldo also uses open-source code and adheres to agile and secure delivery practices to drive continuous innovation and align with strict financial services industry regulations. However, given the speed at which its dynamic cloud environment changes, and the prevalence of open-source code in its applications, Soldo needed to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities in its production environment, to keep its customers’ data and transactions secure. Achieving this was previously a challenge, as the company’s software testing practices and tools were mainly focused on pre-production. Each time its development and security teams discovered new zero-day vulnerabilities, they had to search for them manually.

BNZ, one of the four largest banks in New Zealand, was looking to expand its market and attract a younger, more digital-savvy customer base. To do this, it launched YouMoney, an award-winning online banking platform designed to provide a customizable, user-focused financial management experience. However, supporting this modern digital banking approach required BNZ to adopt a cloud-first strategy, migrating away from on-premises environments and deploying all new applications to the cloud. This resulted in an increasingly complex hybrid infrastructure that posed new challenges for the bank. BNZ needed to manage and monitor this infrastructure to prevent any technical issues that could disrupt customer interactions. It also needed to optimize user experiences, which meant frequently rolling out changes without risking downtime. To achieve this, BNZ required end-to-end visibility into all customer transactions at a granular level, across each touchpoint, and the ability to quickly identify the root cause of any issues.