West Lotto improves service resilience and maintains seamless availability during peak hours with Dynatrace and dakoServ
Germany’s most popular lottery company adopts unified observability platform to enable continuous optimization of Kubernetes environment
Industry
Gaming
Challenge
West Lotto, Germany's largest state-owned lottery company, needed automated observability at scale to monitor the complex Kubernetes architecture underpinning its website and sales points
West Lotto is Germany’s largest publicly owned lottery company, with its tickets and scratch cards disbursed across 3,300 stores and its website. Around the time of draws and jackpots, West Lotto experienced significant surges in demand on its site and from points of sale. To ensure it could better support this demand and safeguard customer experience, West Lotto pivoted to a more scalable container-based digital services environment. However, this has come with its own challenges, with the complexity of West Lotto’s Kubernetes architecture making it difficult to obtain an overview of service performance and availability in real-time.
West Lotto employs best-in-class infrastructure to support its operations, which demanded premium class monitoring. With Dynatrace, West Lotto has a solution that provides the precise answers that its team needs to continuously analyze the performance of digital services and improve their resilience.
Anticipating cyclical demand
Every week, West Lotto needs to process ticket sales, update its records to verify winners, and enable players to claim winnings. Historically, the applications supporting these services were built as a monolith, creating the risk of performance slowdowns and bottlenecks during times of peak demand. This prompted West Lotto to migrate to a Kubernetes architecture, which could rapidly scale in response to cyclical peaks in demand.
However, West Lotto found that the sheer number of microservices supporting its applications made it difficult for teams to easily understand and manage service performance and availability. The team realized they needed a full-stack observability solution to provide visibility over their environment, enabling them to continually optimize and manage its performance.
Demonstrating potential
West Lotto turned to dakoServ, its long-term solutions partner. Given this long-standing relationship, dakoServ was in a strong position to assess and advise West Lotto on possible solutions to meet its unique requirements. Following initial discussions, dakoServ and West Lotto established a proof of concept (POC) to evaluate three observability solutions, including Dynatrace.
During the POC, the main consideration for West Lotto was the speed at which the solutions could generate insights in an on-premises Kubernetes deployment, along with the quality of insights on application performance and the user experience.
West Lotto selected Dynatrace due to the quality and precision of the insights it provided. Teams saved a significant amount of time they previously spent examining dashboards, due to the Dynatrace platform’s AI-powered capabilities rapidly surfacing precise answers on application and infrastructure performance.
Looking to the future
Following the POC, dakoServ has worked with West Lotto to provide continuous technical support to maximize the impact of Dynatrace on its business. Both West Lotto and dakoServ have a strong eye to the future and are working together to explore the potential migration from Dynatrace Managed to its SaaS solution to unlock further benefits. West Lotto is also looking to extend its use of Dynatrace to further use cases that will enable it to improve security and user experience with the platform’s Application Security and Digital Experience Monitoring modules.
Through our partnership with Dynatrace, we provided counsel and technical support to West Lotto throughout their observability adoption journey, enabling them to take full advantage of the data-driven insights of the platform. With its ample resources and support for partners, Dynatrace has helped us to make West Lotto’s observability journey a seamless one.
