Everyone and their mother is talking about big data these days – how to manage it, how to analyze it, how to gain insight from it – but very few organizations actually have big data that they have to worry about managing or analyzing. That’s not the case for FamilySearch, the world’s largest genealogy organization. FamilySearch has 10 petabytes of census records, photographs, immigration records, etc. in its database, and its data grows every day as volunteers upload more documents. Ironically, this organization that’s tasked with cataloging our past is now on the forefront of the big data trend, as they’re being forced to find new and innovative ways to manage and scale this data.

From 2011 to 2012, FamilySearch scaled almost every aspect of their application, from data to throughput to user concurrency. According to Bob Hartley, Principal Engineer and Development Manager at FamilySearch, AppDynamics was instrumental in this project. Hartley estimates that FamilySearch saved $4.8 million over two years by using AppDynamics to optimize the application instead of scaling infrastructure. That’s a pretty big number, so we broke it down for you in this infographic:

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<a href="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/2013/02/05/familysearch-saves-4-8-million-with-appdynamics-infographic" title="AppDynamics Application Performance Management"><br /> <img src="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/AppDynamics_FamilySearch_infographic.jpg" alt="FamilySearch ROI Infographic" /></a><br /> <br/>Source: <a href="http://www.appdynamics.com" title="AppDynamics Application Performance Management Tools">AppDynamics: Application Monitoring Company</a><br/>

How FamilySearch Scaled

• From 11,500 tpm to 122,000 tpm
• From 6,000 users per minute to 12,000 users per minute
• From 12 application releases per year to 20 application releases per year
• From 10 PB of data to approaching 20 PB of data
• No additional infrastructure
• Response time reduced from minutes to seconds

Before AppDynamics

• 227 Severity-1 incidents/year took 33 hours each to troubleshoot
• 300 pre-production defects per year took 49 hours each to troubleshoot
• This amounts to a total of 36,891 man-hours spent on troubleshooting every year

After AppDynamics

FamilySearch estimates that they saved $4.8 million with AppDynamics in two years. That’s a huge number, so let’s break it down:

Infrastructure Savings:

• FamilySearch would have had to purchase 1,200 servers at approx. $1,000 each, amounting to $1,200,215 in savings
• Those 1,200 servers would cost $2,064,370 in power and air conditioning
• Those 1,200 servers would cost $200,000 in administrative costs over two years

Productivity Savings:

FamilySearch estimates that they’ve reduced troubleshooting time for both pre-production defects and production incidents by 45%, amounting to $885,170 in savings for pre-production and $460,836 in savings for production incidents (based on average salaries for those positions).

To learn more about what FamilySearch accomplished and how they use AppDynamics, check out their case study and Bob Hartley’s video interview on the FamilySearch ROI page.

Big Data, Enterprise APM, Java Monitoring

Edmunds.com, the leading online automobile resource, is in the fast lane to achieve $1.2 Million in savings using AppDynamics to monitor their web application performance. John Martin, Senior Director of Production Engineering, opens up about his road trip through managing application performance.  Martin’s operations team was able to reach goals and destinations that were not previously possible and turn “feelings into facts”, by using AppDynamics.

Driving a DevOps Culture

Martin’s goals as the leader of production engineering at Edmunds.com include maintaining a collaborative DevOps culture and keeping response times below 150 milliseconds.  “Our development team is very data-driven”, said Martin, “so it is necessary that whenever an event occurs in production that the operations teams are able to feed back actual data to development.”  With AppDynamics, the operations team is able to present “facts instead of feelings” to development.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, DevOps, Edmunds, High Availability, ROI, SOA

NEWS FLASH: People love news, and they love to have it fast. So when their favorite newsfeed or website doesn’t load fast enough—it can be seriously frustrating.

Fox News, renowned news outlet with up to a billion page views per month – well over 32 million page views per day – takes its news access seriously.  Ryan Jairam, System Administrator at Fox News, opened up about his experiences managing application performance and the role AppDynamics has played in his success.

The “System Was A Complete Disaster”

For two years, the Fox News “system was a complete disaster,” said Jairam.  Sometimes transactions were taking up to 5 minutes, and having to troubleshoot such issues continuously wasted weeks of engineering time.  As issues multiplied, “solutions” were used—which were actually last resorts such as system reboots or excessive caching. These sleight-of-hand maneuvers only masked serious underlying problems.

Jairam admitted they spent too much time firefighting—“We should have been doing other things instead, such as focusing on innovation.” Fed up with the firefighting, Jairam explored several application management tools (such as OPNET Panorama). However, these legacy tools proved unsuitable for their environment: “The overhead was so much it was killing me.”

MTTR Slashed With AppDynamics

He then discovered AppDynamics, which he found was a fit for a high-volume production environments. Deploying the solution, Jairam’s team immediately identified and resolved some of Fox News’ long-standing performance problems.

The ROI has been considerable as well. Fox News is pleased to have saved over $235K annually in productivity since using AppDynamics.  Jairam said, “It’s been a complete night and day difference here with AppDynamics. Now we have time to focus on new things and not just fight fires all day.”

Specific benefits include providing visibility into Fox News’ application infrastructure, as well as external service providers, which has reduced their Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR) in production to minutes.  This alone translates to over $165K/year in productivity savings, not to mention an additional $70K/year savings in labor costs associated with a 90% reduction in support tickets.

“We used to have six or seven support tickets a day about our application–now we only have one or two per week,” Jairam said.

Hundreds of Thousands Saved

AppDynamics not only saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, but freed up valuable time so IT dev and ops teams could focusing on other areas of the infrastructure.  In fact, with things working so well, Jairam now has big plans for the future use of AppDynamics at Fox News—some include utilizing the solution to optimize code and test database changes, along with workflow automation to remediate infrastructure issues.

In the meantime, saving $235K/year for Fox News by purchasing AppDynamics isn’t too shabby.

You can read the full ROI Case Study HERE.

apm, application monitoring, Fox News, OpNet, Panorama, Return on Investment, ROI