CoreLogic
CoreLogic Addresses Third-Party Performance Issues with AppDynamics
Key Benefits
Gained real-time, system-wide visibility of application performance
Minimized customer impacts through proactive insights
Facilitated multi-team collaboration and fostered a DevOps mentality
Challenge: Visibility into Root Cause of Problems
As Senior Development Manager at RP Data, David Garry, oversees development efforts in Australia while working closely with development teams in New Zealand, Philippines, and India.
Teams are comprised of both internal developers and vendors who work closely together to create and maintain services that deliver RP Data’s real estate data and analytics.
These services are developed in technologies such as Java, .NET, SQL Server, Postgres and are required to integrate with external systems such as Google Maps, Payment gateways, Titles offices as well as RP Data’s vast property database.
In early 2012, a third-party iPhone app that delivered RP Data services was experiencing significant performance issues, resulting in frustrated end users. “End-user feedback was going directly to the app vendor. By the time we became aware of the problem, we needed to quickly resolve it,” recalls Garry. “Trouble is, without visibility into the application, no one really knew the true cause of the problem.” As finger-pointing ensued between web services, database, and the 3rd party teams, Garry realized they needed an application performance management (APM) solution to pinpoint the problem and get the service back on track.
“AppDynamics is a very powerful tool. We use its alerts to provide proactive warnings about potential issues before they impact end-users.”
David GarrySenior Development Manager @CoreLogic RP Data
About CoreLogic RP Data
Whether people are buying or selling property on Sydney Harbour or in the Australian Outback, one question tops all others: What’s the property actually worth? Accurate and timely valuation data impacts more than just buyers and sellers—this knowledge is essential for agents, mortgage brokers, financial planners, government bodies, and lenders.
No one understands this better than RP Data, a CoreLogic company. RP Data is a leading provider of property information, analytics and risk management services to businesses and government organizations. The company has more than 480 employees at seven locations in Australia and New Zealand, as well as offshore outposts in India and the Philippines.
Customers rely on RP Data’s comprehensive database and analytics services to make informed decisions about property transactions, risk and other market opportunities. More than 70% of all real estate agents in Australia use RP Data and its Mortgage Platforms cover more than 90% of the country’s mortgage lending. In other words, when the company’s applications and web portals slow down, so does real estate activity in this part of the world.
Problems Isolated Within 15 Minutes
RP Data quickly conducted an APM vendor review, which included AppDynamics and New Relic. The CTO of RP Data had experience with AppDynamics, and was a strong advocate for the solution.
Based on our CTO’s previous review and our research, we determined that New Relic could deliver some of the necessary insight, but we’d still require quite a bit of further investigation. Conversely, we knew that we could quickly deploy AppDynamics and determine exactly what was happening right away.
AppDynamics’ elite partner, Ecetera, showed the RP Data team how to navigate through AppDynamics and troubleshoot their performance issues. As a result Garry and his team were able to use AppDynamics to isolate a key mobile app issue within the first 15 minutes of installing the APM solution.
“Once we turned it on, we gained full visibility into the behavior of our underlying data and app performance on the network layer. We also discovered how people were interfacing with the web services,” informs Garry. “Today, AppDynamics gives us concrete, unbiased data so we can very quickly isolate problems and make improvements. For example, I can determine if our Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) are configured correctly by instantly seeing if caches are filling up and adjusting memory resources to optimize application performance."
“We knew that if we deployed AppDynamics, we would be guaranteed to find out exactly what was happening right away.”
David GarrySenior Development Manager @CoreLogic RP Data
The AppDynamics solution delivers immediate value for RP Data and can be used by the non-technical staff as well as developers and testers. Garry has championed it throughout his organization and the entire product team and senior management use the tool on a regular basis.
“We’ve practically got our whole organization using it now. AppDynamics is a very, very powerful tool. We use its alerts to provide proactive warnings about potential issues before they impact end-users. Being able to head off a problem before it affects the customer is a huge advantage. We are even looking at installing it on large screens and dashboards throughout our office for immediate insight into how everything is performing,” says Garry.
Today’s hybrid applications depend on diverse sets of distributed data, systems and services, making application performance monitoring mandatory for success. Here’s how Garry sums up his views on this APM solution. “AppDynamics provides the best package and the best insight, bringing instant visibility to the entire organization. I really recommend it to anyone who’s running a business that requires accurate visibility into their production environment. It’s an excellent way to ensure customers are receiving optimal service levels.”
“The tool gives us concrete, unbiased data so we can very quickly isolate problems and make improvements.”
David GarrySenior Development Manager @CoreLogic RP Data
