Experian at Perform 2018: Dynatrace saves them 70% in SLA costs

The tech blogosphere has recently seen a cache of opinion and items concerning “real time feedback”; is it good for your business? How should it be used? Is it reliable enough to impact business-critical decisions? This was precisely the topic of a presentation given by Experian at Perform 2018, the Dynatrace User Conference held in Las Vegas, NV back in January.

Experian is a market-leading consumer credit reporting agency, which relies on several channels for their customers to access information, specifically through various web and mobile interfaces. One of the major challenges is ensuring the consistent delivery of this best-in-class service in accordance with their SLAs – with a potentially costly price-tag for each failure. Denny Galiano, Director of Business Partner Decision Analytics and Alvin Petersen, Senior IT Leader, presented Experian’s experience in utilizing real-time feedback through Dynatrace, resulting in a drastic change in their development culture and a net benefit of slashing SLA penalties by 70%.

In addition to this overall optimization effort, Experian had an ongoing initiative and effort towards ITIL compliance, which meant that the scope of this project impacted business, IT as well as compliance This highlighted the fact that Experian needed to solve some tough questions if they were going to be able to achieve their goals, namely how would they:

• Detect problems pro-actively?
• Reduce outage times?
• Troubleshoot faster?
• Keep engineering focused on the right issues?
• Improve and Combine “Release Management” & “Root Cause”?
• Integrate into our ITIL & ITSM processes?
• Monitor local, virtual, cloud, or containers from a single dashboard?

It was for these very challenges that Experian realized they were in need of a solution that would provide them real-time feedback regarding their customer-facing applications and how technical issues affected their users and overall business. After a lengthy evaluation process, Experian turned to the Dynatrace platform, which provided them with Real User Monitoring (RUM) that allowed them to understand the user experience of the application before it entered into production. All of this was rolled-out to Experian via the “one agent” architecture from Dynatrace, providing automated updates, dashboards with relevant KPIs, baselining and automatic notifications. Using the Dynatrace Insights team, Experian’s Developers were paired with a “Guardian”, who provided real-time training and knowledge transfer throughout the process, with the goals being complete self-sufficiency for Experian.

Once deployed, both the business/finance team and the IT departments were able to combine their data to analyze the real benefits the real-time feedback from Dynatrace brought to Experian- specific results they found were:

• Reduced outage minutes by 85%.
• Reduced SLA penalties/credits by 70%.
• Pro-Active Issue Detection
• Stopped custom monitoring tool development

Experian credits both the Dynatrace technology and the Guardian as their key to success in this project, which ultimately impacted their bottom line in an ongoing, measurable way; as Denny put it “We’ve had double-digit growth for quite a few quarters now”. Dynatrace drove cultural change within the organization as it reduced the time of finding the root-cause of incidents from 45 minutes down to an average of just 10!

What’s next for Experian now that they have experienced the first round of benefits with their Dynatrace implementation? They plan to continue to utilize the power of AI to monitor live, Real User activity and conduct Impact diagnostics to quickly gain insight into how the root-cause of events, such as java script errors, affects user behavior, so they can anticipate and correct issues before they pose a threat. They also want to use Dynatrace to “clean up” faulty or “at risk” assets so they can replace before they affect the production environment.
You can watch the entire session by clicking on the player below:

This is just one of the many compelling stories and real-life use cases that our customers have shared with us at the Perform 2018 conference in Las Vegas. To see and hear even more stories around Business Transformation, we invite you to register and join us for Perform Europe taking place May 23-25, 2018 at the W Hotel in Barcelona.