If you’ve used a GPS product before you’re probably familiar with Garmin. They are the leading worldwide provider of navigation devices and technologies. In addition to their popular consumer GPS products, Garmin also offers devices for planes, boats, outdoor activities, fitness, and cars. Because end user experience is so important to Garmin and its customers, ensuring the speed of its web and mobile applications is one of its highest priorities.
This blog post summarizes the content of a case study that can be found by clicking here.
The reality in today’s IT driven world is that there are many different issues that need to be solved and therefore many different use cases for the products designed to help with these issues. Garmin has shown it’s industry leadership by taking advantage of AppDynamics to address many use cases with a single product. This shows a high level of maturity that most organizations strive to achieve.
“We never had anything that would give us a good deep dive into what was going on in the transactions inside our application – we had no historical data, and we had no insight into database calls, threads, etc.,” – Doug Strick
AppDynamics flow map showing part of Garmin’s production environment.
Real-Time and Historic Visibility in Production
You just can’t test everything before your application goes to production. Real users will find ways to break your application and/or make it slow to a crawl. When this happens you need historical data to compare against as well as real-time information to quickly remediate problems.
Garmin found that AppDynamics, an application performance management solution designed for high-volume production environments, best suited its needs. Garmin’s operations team feels comfortable leaving AppDynamics on in the production environment, allowing them to respond more quickly and collect historical data.
The following use cases are examples of how Garmin is attacking IT and business problems to better serve their company and their customers.
Use Case 1: Memory Monitoring
Before they started using AppDynamics, Garmin was unable to track application memory usage over time. Using AppDynamics they were able to identify a major memory issue impacting customers and ensure a fast and stable user experience. Click here to read the details in the case study.
Chart of heap usage over time.
Use Case 2: Automated Remediation Using Application Run Book Automation
AppDynamics’ Application Run Book Automation feature allows organizations to trigger certain tasks, such as restarting a JVM or running a script, with thresholds in AppDynamics. Garmin was able to use this feature very effectively one weekend while waiting for a fix from a third party. Click here to read the details in the case study.
Use Case 3: Code-level Diagnostics
“We knew we needed a tool that could constantly monitor our production environment, allowing us to collect historical data and trend performance over time,” said Strick. “Also, we needed something that would give us a better view of what was going on inside the application at the code level.” – Doug Strick
With AppDynamics, Garmin’s application teams have been able to rapidly resolve several issues originating in the application code. Click here to read the details in the case study.
Use Case 4: Bad Configuration in Production
Garmin also uses AppDynamics to verify that new code releases perform well. Because Garmin has an agile release schedule, new code releases are very frequent (every 2 weeks) and it’s important to ensure that each release goes smoothly. One common problem that occurs when deploying new code is that configurations for test are not updated for the production environment, resulting in performance issues. Click here to read the details in the case study.
AppDynamics flow map showing production nodes making services calls to test environments.
Use Case 5: Real-time Business Metrics (RTBM)
IT metrics alone don’t tell the whole story. There can be business problems due to pricing issues our issues with external service providers that impact the business and will never show up as an IT metric. That’s why AppDynamics created RTBM and why Garmin adopted it so early on in their deployment of AppDynamics. With Real-Time Business Metrics, organizations like Garmin can collect, monitor, and visualize transaction payload data from their applications. Strick used this capability to measure the revenue flow in Garmin’s eCommerce application. Click here to read the details in the case study.
Real-time order totals for web orders.
Conclusion
“AppDynamics has given us visibility into areas we never had visibility into before… Some issues that used to take several hours now take under 30 minutes to resolve, or a matter of seconds if we’re using Run Book Automation.” – Doug Strick
Garmin has shown how to get real value out of its APM tool of choice and you can do the same. Click here to try AppDynamics for free in your environment today.
