ExactTarget

ExactTarget selects AppDynamics to monitor marketing cloud performance

Key Benefits

Achieved results within hours of implementation


Identified previously undetected performance issues


Facilitated DevOps collaboration

Challenge: Rapidly changing, complex environment required sophisticated monitoring

Kevin Siminski, Director of Infrastructure Operations at ExactTarget, is responsible for making sure the technology that supports a broad offering of digital marketing solutions, delivers a positive experience to clients and their customers.

“Our environment is almost exclusively .NET. We have thousands of VM guests, all serving our entire application suite,” said Siminski.

“So it's a very challenging environment in the sense that we have a lot of moving pieces—and we have to keep everything moving at the same pace so that we can serve our clients as needed.”

He added, “The challenges we faced were wide and varied. We deal with a very complex application, a lot of legacy components, and a lot of new technology features. And we were faced with the decision of trying to find a vendor that could cover all those facets of operations.

“We chose the AppDynamics platform because we felt it was incredibly agile: we literally had it working in about 6 hours on the first day of the proof of concept. In comparison, the other vendor still wasn't working even after two weeks!”

Kevin Siminski
Director of Infrastructure Operations  @ExactTarget

About ExactTarget

The ExactTarget Marketing Cloud from salesforce.com is the leading 1:1 digital marketing platform, connecting companies with customers in entirely new ways. Its award-winning solutions and service help the world's best brands—large and small—better connect with their consumers across all digital marketing channels—email, mobile, social, web, and beyond.

Deployed AppDynamics quickly with immediate impact

Deployed AppDynamics quickly with immediate impact successfully in a complex environment while providing the deep visibility required to keep delivering award-winning service to clients. “Our focus on finding an APM solution led us to work with two vendors—one was AppDynamics and one was one of the larger enterprise solutions,” said Siminski.

“We chose the AppDynamics platform because we felt it was incredibly agile: we literally had it working in about 6 hours on the first day of the proof of concept. In comparison, the other vendor still wasn't working even after two weeks!”

 



Gained deep visibility into applications

“The day we went live we were given access and visibility into a lot of things our Operations team didn't realize were happening behind-the-scenes inside our application,” said Siminski. He added that the AppDynamics APM solution, “Immediately exposed issues and some low-hanging fruit that we could pick off and get tremendous gains in our how our application runs. We were immediately able to integrate and work very closely with our development team to solve very complex problems that had been around for years inside our application.”

In addition, the AppDynamics platform fostered a new collaboration between development and operations at ExactTarget. “When I started, we had two very separate organizations,” said Siminski. “Today we have teams that collaborate together to try to solve difficult problems. So we now have a very robust two-way dialogue with our development organization as well as our infrastructure organization.” Siminski indicated that this dialogue was enlightened by data from the AppDynamics solution.

Siminski concluded, “From my perspective, I would recommend AppDynamics to anyone who is in a mission-critical operations center. I would also look at QA test teams—the folks in the organization who are working with the development teams and testing the code before it rolls into production. They're clearly an audience who can benefit greatly from AppDynamics APM.

“We were immediately able to integrate and work very closely with our development team to solve very complex problems that had been around for years inside our application.”

Kevin Siminski, Director of Infrastructure Operations, ExactTarget

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