Cepheid
Cepheid gains unprecedented visibility into the performance of all its mission-critical SAP business applications
Key Benefits
Real-time SAP monitoring of mission critical applications ensures seamless business operations.
Dynamic baselines of key metrics help Cepheid reduce alert storm and act swiftly on anomalous conditions.
Cepheid operations shifted from reactive to proactive monitoring.
Challenge: To ensure SAP uptime and performance, Cepheid needed to transition from disparate monitoring tools to a comprehensive full-stack solution.
For years, Cepheid’s operations team was required to monitor and support the operational maintenance of its SAP applications. This required round-the-clock support, much of which was spent using disparate tools, including logs, to manually monitor the SAP environment.
“AppDynamics is the foundation by which we can relate system and application downtime into process downtime for an overall business impact analysis.”
Sandeep RaikarDirector @IT Infrastructure at Cepheid
Even with all these tools and time, the company was still in reactive mode. While they had a team available 24/7/365 to resolve issues, there was no way to detect problems before users were negatively affected. The model proved to be inefficient and costly, so Cepheid started looking at comprehensive monitoring solutions and ultimately chose AppDynamics.
“If there was a problem in the environment, we needed to be the first to know so we could fix issues before users were affected. AppDynamics demonstrated it could be one point of contact for all our proactive monitoring needs,” says Sandeep Raikar, Director, IT Infrastructure at Cepheid.
AppDynamics for SAP enables Cepheid to quickly understand all dependencies across its systems, allowing them to automatically baseline, identify, and isolate the root cause of problems before users are impacted. When an issue does arise, finding and remediating the problem is faster than ever so that mission-critical applications — and the business — keep running.
About Cepheid
Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Cepheid is a leading molecular diagnostics company dedicated to improving healthcare by developing, manufacturing, and marketing accurate yet easy-to-use molecular systems and tests. By automating highly complex and time-consuming manual procedures, the company’s solutions deliver a better way for institutions of any size to perform sophisticated genetic testing for organisms and genetic-based diseases. Through its strong molecular biology capabilities, the company is focusing on those applications where accurate, rapid, and actionable test results are needed most, such as managing infectious diseases and cancer. For more information, visit http://www.cepheid.com.
If any of Cepheid’s SAP applications go down, the outage causes severe disruptions to business operations. To ensure that doesn’t happen, instead of reacting when a user files a trouble ticket, AppDynamics provides proactive real-time monitoring of all the company’s SAP resources and applications. The solution also delivers alerts when Cepheid needs to take action to fix issues before they become problems.
“Before AppDynamics, we had manual monitoring performed for all our SAP applications in each shift, which accounted for about six hours a day spent manually monitoring the environment to make sure nothing went down,” says Kamlendra Kumar, Cepheid SAP Basis Administrator. “That manual monitoring has gone away because everything is automated using AppDynamics.”
Because of the nature of Cepheid’s business— developing, manufacturing, and marketing molecular systems and tests — the impact of the downtime is severe. “If SAP is down, that means manufacturing will be down which in turn results in loss of revenue. It’s very critical,” says Raikar. “All our SAP solutions must have 99.95% availability.”
AppDynamics automatically calculates the baseline performance for Cepheid’s SAP applications. And once those baselines are established, it detects and alerts on anomalous conditions, eliminating the need for manual SAP monitoring. These intelligent alerts also reduce the noise from siloed monitoring tools.
“With dynamic baselines, there is intelligence in place, so we are getting appropriate proactive alerts and those tell us where to assign our resources,” says Kumar. “Without AppDynamics, we would only know about performance issues when users complained and then we’d have to pick and choose which problem to address out of the hundreds of emails.”
“We get alerted to potential issues before they become problems and that’s only been possible with AppDynamics’ dynamic baseline.”
Kamlendra KumarSAP Basis Administrator at Cepheid
Raikar agrees. “Noise is reduced, and we get alerted to potential issues before they become problems — that’s only been possible with AppDynamics’ dynamic baseline,” he says.
Cepheid is embarking on some important initiatives as a part of its digital transformation journey. “As we move forward in our digital transformation, AppDynamics will be critical,” said Raikar.
Cepheid appreciates how AppDynamics can help highlight the impact and effects of poor application performance to line-of-business leaders and company executives. “At the end of the day, the question is: which services have been impacted and how does that translate to loss of revenue? AppDynamics is the foundation by which we can relate system and application downtime to process downtime for an overall business impact analysis.”
