Imagine you’re in a war room. Your ops team is seeing services that aren’t responsive, and customer complaints have started rolling in. But your infrastructure teams don’t see any issue on their AWS monitoring or Azure monitoring tools, your platform team doesn’t see anything too concerning in Kubernetes logging, and your apps team says there are green lights across the board. So, what happens next? The blame game. You think you’ve achieved observability through multiple cloud monitoring tools, but they’re fragmented, and teams are siloed, so no one has the context to identify the answers.
This scenario has become all too common as digital infrastructure has grown increasingly complex. Organizations are rapidly adopting multicloud architectures to achieve the agility needed to drive customer success through new digital service channels. Every component has its own siloed cloud monitoring tool, with its own set of data. Some looking at back-end performance – such as code execution time, CPU, or Kubernetes monitoring – and some looking at front-end performance – business KPIs, and whether apps are running well for customers. What’s missing is the context to tie it all together.
Ken Schirrmacher, Senior Director of IT for Park ‘N Fly, joined us at Perform 2021 to share how Dynatrace seamlessly connects its front-end user experience with back-end cloud monitoring, which eliminated blind spots and has allowed teams to optimize customers’ digital journeys.
Kiosks, mobile apps, websites, and QR codes
Park ‘N Fly’s business relies on successfully integrating its booking system with its custom-built kiosks located at its off-airport parking lots. “As you can imagine, it’s kind of a complex technical offering that we have”, explained Schirrmacher. “We seamlessly integrate our app, mobile, web, and kiosk experiences.
Dynatrace’s cloud monitoring capabilities support this by giving Park ‘N Fly a single source of truth into any performance changes across its technology stack in real-time. Schirrmacher gave the example of a customer driving up to a gate and trying to use their QR code to scan in. “What if there was a delay of 15 seconds?” Whilst it may not sound like a long time, fifteen seconds is an eternity when you’re rushing to get to your gate. “Dynatrace will point out the performance characteristic we can home in on, which enables us to make sure the customer experience is good.”
Seeing the smoke before the fire starts
Schirrmacher went on to explain how Dynatrace can help predict problems before they reach the customer, “How do you find out the fire’s happening? That comes from the smoke, which comes from the spark, that comes from the ember. So as you track it down through the different levels, you don’t want it to build up to where it’s a complete outage.”
By continuously monitoring its entire environment on one platform, Park ‘N Fly can identify problems as they arise at each level of the business, before they trickle down to the customer. For example, if there is a latency on a particular service, Dynatrace will flag this and trace its source – even if the source is a third party.
“Through Dynatrace, we’ve started giving our partners availability reports,” Schirrmacher explained. “We’ve hooked up synthetic monitoring, we emulated all of our calls, we had Dynatrace set to investigate those calls so we can tell when our partners are up and running and responding appropriately. We can see latency trends so we can say, ‘hey, you guys at nine o’clock at night keep having horrible latency spikes, and you’re causing a problem for our customers.’” As a result, Park ‘N Fly can work more effectively with its partners to resolve those issues.
By using Dynatrace as an all-in-one cloud monitoring platform, Park ‘N Fly has escaped the blame game with true observability across its digital infrastructure and even extended this capability to improve collaboration with third-party partners. This has enabled a more proactive and predictive company culture, where the focus is shifted from firefighting to innovation.
To learn more about how Park ‘N Fly used Dynatrace cloud monitoring to break down silos and optimize customer experiences, watch the full session below:
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