Clario helps improve patient lives by optimizing its clinical trials platform with Dynatrace

Clario is undergoing rapid growth and has a complex, hybrid environment spanning multiple monolithic applications running on a multitude of legacy systems and cloud platforms. The environment became even more complex as Clario began to migrate to a cloud native architecture running on Kubernetes and to consolidate its cloud footprint onto AWS.

Clario needed to find a more effective way to build and run digital services, while reducing maintenance costs. It decided to build a new clinical trials platform on a domain-driven, cloud-agnostic architecture using Kubernetes. It also needed a more unified monitoring solution that could surface the answers that developers need to continuously identify, understand, and resolve anomalies or performance issues within this architecture, to accelerate innovation and optimize user-experiences.

Clario selected Dynatrace as the central monitoring solution for a new consolidated DevOps toolchain, having been impressed by its easy implementation and the rich AI-powered insights it could provide. Clario’s DevOps team quickly set up a trial and rolled out Dynatrace to a development environment in just minutes during a train journey back from an event. The team was excited by the speed at which Dynatrace was able to light-up the entire application and infrastructure topology and start surfacing insights.

“I was with my A-Team at the AWS Summit in Berlin, and we met with Dynatrace and one of its competitors, and looked at both solutions,” said Simon Pilar, Director DevOps & Toolchain, Clario. “Dynatrace told us, you just need to deploy the OneAgent and everything will pop up and make connections, then it's done. The other solution was very complex to configure, so we found it difficult to believe it could be that simple. We signed up to the Dynatrace free trial on the train and knew we had found a great fit for our needs.”

• Traceability across a modern stack: Dynatrace’s Grail technology, coupled with its support for OpenTelemetry, means that Clario can ingest log monitoring data from any source in its domain-driven architecture. As a result, Clario gains deeper insights and detailed context that is used to enforce performance SLAs for critical business processes, due to analyzing monitoring, logs, and user session data together in a single platform. Clario was also able to activate Grail within minutes, decommissioning its legacy log monitoring tool to drive further efficiency gains.

• Support for shift-left quality checks: With Dynatrace, Clario’s developers deploy and configure monitoring capabilities as code. This makes it easier to adhere to shift-left approaches by establishing quality and performance testing earlier in the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). Clario is also using Dynatrace to implement automated quality gates that validate deployments, which gives developers precise answers about the performance of newly deployed services.

• Driving faster innovation: Dynatrace enables Clario’s developers to identify performance issues during the early stages of the software delivery lifecycle, so they can prevent bad code from progressing through the pipeline. As a result, Clario can accelerate innovation, by providing its developers with the precise answers they need to optimize their code and create better end-user experiences from the very beginning.

• AI-powered answers: There are hundreds of individuals at Clario who access the insights from Dynatrace, across development, operations, and product teams. These teams are gaining actionable insights that enrich their knowledge and broaden their view of how their products are working. As a result, they can continually improve Clario’s platform and find ways to better meet the needs of the patients and medical researchers engaged in clinical trials.

“It's important that our platform is highly available and that the system works effectively,” continued Pilar. “By providing advanced observability across our DevOps processes and app delivery pipelines, Dynatrace allows us to see the smoke before the fire starts to burn. We can stop bad code from ever reaching production. Dynatrace is a great partner. We communicate constantly about new technologies and use cases for our platform, which helps us to consistently deliver high quality clinical trial data for our customers.”