InPost powers modern parcel service and international expansion with Dynatrace

InPost is a leader in modern logistics services, striving to make receiving parcels convenient, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly. Every parcel’s journey is underpinned by technology. Most journeys start in the InPost app, which now attracts millions of users across the company’s seven operating regions. Customers also use technology to interact with InPost’s 24/7 lockers, which are automatically opened by scanning QR codes and labels. Every touchpoint must be intuitive and work seamlessly, or customers could be driven to using other postal services next time.

Constant investment in digital transformation and service optimization has enabled InPost to drive rapid international expansion. During the process, InPost built up a complex technology stack, underpinned by a hybrid infrastructure, including microservices, Kubernetes, and third-party applications. InPost initially adopted Dynatrace to gain a single source of truth into this complex IT environment. To accelerate its transformation further, InPost then began to explore the use cases for Dynatrace’s latest innovations, such as Grail™.

InPost wanted to use Dynatrace for advanced business analytics and process visualization. With Grail™, InPost could enhance its business process monitoring capabilities and incorporate logs and custom metrics into observability-driven analytics. This unlocked new possibilities for optimizing user experiences and driving business resilience, based on an unprecedented level of insight into parcel journeys.

“With Dynatrace we can do so much more than monitoring and advanced observability – we can get the data from logs to support all areas of the business,” said Mateusz Piasta, Lead Site Reliability Engineer at InPost. “Dynatrace provides us with detailed visualization that aids us in avoiding blind spots. These insights support us with internal user onboarding, stress testing new applications, and understanding customer journeys. With the new platform capabilities, we have all the data we need in one place – including custom metrics. Dynatrace enables us to help our users by contacting them before they raise a ticket, which is a much better customer experience.”

• Automated root-cause analysis: The full stack observability and Davis® AI from Dynatrace enables InPost to identify problems as soon as they appear and highlights the precise root cause. InPost now has all the data it needs for complete insight into its complex hybrid environment, with Dynatrace acting as a single source of truth.
• Detailed visualization: With Dynatrace’s new platform capabilities, including Grail™, InPost can now better monitor complex business processes. For example, creating a new parcel label has an SLO of 500 milliseconds. This process involves many steps – including payment, user registration, and geo-localization of the address. Dynatrace enables InPost’s teams to visualize each step in a single view and identify points that can be optimized to make user journeys more reliable.
• Seamless operations: Dynatrace’s real-user monitoring empowers InPost to understand exactly which points in customer journeys are causing frustration. For example, it can identify rage clicks, or whether users with a particular IP address are more affected by an issue. Dynatrace’s synthetic monitoring capabilities also enable InPost’s teams to run stress tests, so they can ensure the technology environment is prepared to withstand at least 50% more traffic.
• No more blind spots: Working with its technology partner, Spica, InPost has built a CMDB app using Dynatrace AppEngine. The app enables InPost’s teams to better understand the topology of its environment and relationships between components, including hardware such as label printers. Having this built directly into Dynatrace has significant cost advantages, as there is no need for additional agents or licenses. Dynatrace also enables full coverage of InPost’s cloud environments, supporting its continued migration.

“Dynatrace is really easy to use, and more people are using it at InPost every day,” continued Piasta. “My future vision is for Dynatrace to drive an observability culture at InPost. Right now, we have around 400 users onboarded. I would like to get this to 800 and educate users on how they can leverage Grail™ as a source of truth for business processes. By continuously improving processes with the insights from Dynatrace, we can deliver fast and reliable services that make our customers happy.”