City of Munich
City of Munich improves the user experience with the help of AppDynamics
Key benefits
Established proactive monitoring to identify problems and root causes
Improved user experience for citizens
Gained a uniform view of the system landscape in AppDynamics
The City of Munich pioneered the digitization of its services. It operates two data centers and offers cloud-based services that serve both citizens and employees. To provide the best experience with optimal performance, the IT team of Germany's largest city administration relies on AppDynamics.
“We have succeeded in greatly reducing the outages that citizens and employees encountered in ensuring greater service quality and efficiency in our IT department."
Bernhard Leicht
Leader for Middleware and Monitoring, City of Munich
Challenge
With the gradual expansion of digital services, the IT landscape of the state capital is becoming more and more complex. To deliver optimal and consistent digital experiences, the city needed better visibility into its systems for timely identification and resolution of failures and performance problems.
Solution
With AppDynamics, the city’s IT team can proactively identify and fix problems in the system. Reduced troubleshooting time means that outages and performance issues can often be resolved before citizens or employees notice them.
Results
Thanks to AppDynamics, the City of Munich has managed to get the complexity of its digital infrastructure under control and maintain maximum stability of the IT infrastructure. Performance problems and failures are much more infrequent, and the digital experience has improved significantly.
"The expanded and powerful monitoring with AppDynamics helps us gain deeper insights into the overall application environment. This allows us to carry out better error analyses and, thus, offer increased digital service quality for our employees of the City of Munich and, in particular, for our citizens."
Bernhard Leicht
Leader for Middleware and Monitoring, City of Munich
Challenge
Provide citizens with more digital services while delivering optimal application
The City of Munich is a pioneer in the digitalization of citizen services. It operates two data centers and offers modern, cloud-based services that complement on-site offerings. Citizens no longer have to go to city offices to access services, but can do so conveniently online.
With the city’s continued expansion of its digital offering, however, the IT landscape is becoming increasingly complex. To provide a consistently positive experience for citizens, the city needed to improve visibility into its systems. In the case of failures and performance problems, it was often not immediately clear to those responsible where exactly the error in the application lay. In order to overcome these challenges, it@M, the City of Munich’s IT service provider, went in search of a powerful monitoring solution.
Solution
Proactive monitoring to identify problems and root causes
An internal task force evaluated the leading application performance monitoring solutions on the market. They were looking for a provider that could help proactively identify and resolve critical problems so they could optimize the user experience. The task force decided to implement AppDynamics after it performed well in test cases. "Our goal was to implement a powerful monitoring solution that would deliver improved service and availability to our employees and customers. We therefore looked at various proven tools with a high market reputation and, in the end, decided on AppDynamics,” says Bernhard Leicht, Team Leader for Middleware and Monitoring at the City of Munich.
Improved digital experience for citizens
In the past, when the City of Munich’s IT team was confronted with IT problems, they could only be handled and solved reactively. The search for the cause of errors often took a lot of time due to the number of services and dependencies. This led to dissatisfaction among citizens and, ultimately, to avoidable damage to the reputation of city services. With AppDynamics, the IT team can now proactively detect and fix problems in the system. The reduction in troubleshooting time means that outages and performance difficulties can often be solved before the citizens and employees notice them.
"The expanded and powerful monitoring with AppDynamics helps us gain deeper insights into the overall application environment. This allows us to carry out better error analyses and, thus, offer increased digital service quality for our employees of the City of Munich and, in particular, for our citizens," says Bernhard Leicht.
Uniform view of the system landscape in AppDynamics
To provide insight into the application environment, it@M has various monitoring tools in use that map the basic areas of performance and availability. AppDynamics now complements this with end-to-end visibility across all application components and dependencies. Even purchased applications can be precisely examined. Performance of individual transactions is captured across application, infrastructure, and network.
Various City of Munich teams responsible for development, infrastructure, or IT architecture, can now support each other in troubleshooting.The holistic view provided by AppDynamics helps them manage the increased complexity and deliver an optimal user experience.
Our goal was to implement a powerful monitoring solution that would deliver improved service and availability to our employees and customers. We therefore looked at various proven tools with a high market reputation and, in the end, decided on AppDynamics.”
Bernhard Leicht
Leader for Middleware and Monitoring, City of Munich
AI-based error detection provides clarity
Another challenge the City of Munich faced was alerting, which in the past often resulted in false alarms. Sometimes, the monitoring team had to comb through several hundred messages per day, very few of which related to actual problems. AppDynamics takes an AI-based approach to this challenge and relies on dynamic thresholds that continuously compare application behavior with historical data about the system load.
For example, if there is a particularly high number of users during the usual peak hours and the systems are running under peak load, AppDynamics recognizes this natural deviation and does not sound an alarm. If, on the other hand, there are unscheduled load peaks, performance problems, or even failures, the responsible team receives a message. The automated error analysis then helps to locate the error, allowing the responsible employees to focus on its elimination.
Stable IT infrastructure
Thanks to AppDynamics, the City of Munich has managed to get a grip on the complexity of its digital infrastructure and deliver stability in its IT infrastructure. There are now fewer performance problems and failures, which is why the user experience has improved significantly. This is noticeable for citizens in systems such as the city’s residents registration system, for example. Through AppDynamics support of OpenTelemetry, the city can also use a freely available and globally recognized open source standard for data collection and then further process this data.
It is important to note, however, that the City of Munich’s implementation has by no means reached its final stage. Lifecycles are still being optimized and automated and the monitoring fine-tuned.
"We have succeeded in greatly reducing the outages that citizens and employees encountered in ensuring greater service quality and efficiency in our IT department. So, we have already mapped out our next steps towards expansion to other areas,” says Leicht.
About City of Munich
Munich is the capital city of Bavaria and the third largest city in Germany. Home to centuries-old buildings and historic landmarks, Munich is also known for its annual Oktoberfest celebration and famed Hofbräuhau. It lies about 30 miles north of the Bavarian Alps and is home to more than 1.5 million residents. The city administration provides a wide range of services to its residents, from housing and urban planning to social welfare, transportation, health, education, employment, and many other services. With new, customer-centric organizational and process structures, they are working to support the digitalization of the city of Munich with a high-performance and future-proof IT infrastructure.
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