iGA Bahrain
Kingdom of Bahrain’s Information & eGovernment Authority expands government services with AppDynamics
Key benefits
Optimized performance by reducing downtime and accelerating root cause analysis
Reduced top-priority incidents by more than 80% over 12 months
Improved cross-team collaboration and communication
iGA Bahrain enhanced delivery of governmental services by automating performance alerts and bug identification across its sprawling IT infrastructure. With AppDynamics, the Authority replaced ineffective manual troubleshooting and root cause analysis with automated, contextual, and real-time performance insights across the entire stack.
“AppDynamics has become an essential tool for us to observe, react to, and manage any and every change that might affect application performance."
Abdulrahman Mattar
Acting Chief of Government Systems Control, iGA Bahrain
Challenge
Monitor integrated services and apps to maximize availability, accelerate troubleshooting, and prevent future service interruptions.
Solution
AppDynamics gives iGA Bahrain a comprehensive, real-time snapshot of the health and performance of all applications and the services, in addition to the connections that support them.
Results
iGA Bahrain reduced T1 incidents by more than 80% over 12 months while optimizing the online experience for Bahrain residences and citizens.
"Now that we have visibility across every application and the other applications it integrates with, we can pinpoint exactly where a problem is and rapidly determine how to fix it. We’ve eliminated virtually all downtime issues."
Abdulrahman Mattar
Acting Chief of Government Systems Control, iGA Bahrain
Challenge
Making governmental services available online for residences and citizens
The Kingdom of Bahrain has led the way in early digital adoption for government services, providing an impressive model for governments around the world to emulate. Despite this, the rapid migration online driven by the COVID-19 crisis presented a major challenge for the country’s Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) team.
“Our IT environment is changing rapidly. During migration of systems, we need full monitoring support to catch bugs and misconfigurations up front,” says iGA Acting Chief of Government Systems Control Abdulrahman Mattar. “We also have a lot of integrations and dependencies between systems and require end-to-end visibility to ensure they’re working properly. From development and production through the end user experience, we want to continuously improve our services.”
Manually investigating application incidents across a sprawling environment made it challenging to resolve them quickly and prevent unplanned downtime. Because millions of residences and citizens depend on the services that iGA supports, the Authority sought a solution to help them proactively identify potential issues, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and take preventive measures to protect against future service interruptions.
A 180-degree shift in application performance with full-stack observability
The Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) began using AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring (APM) in 2017 in conjunction with implementation of a new immigration management system. Prior to incorporating AppDynamics into its daily operations, the Authority had to manually investigate and rectify application performance and availability issues, resulting in as many as three service interruptions each day. But by the time they made the shift to fully digital amid the pandemic, that many outages became an unsustainable situation, as virtually every citizen needed to use services online instead of in person.
Mattar says that the complexity of the government’s environment made even a single interruption a potentially major event. One application might tie into as many as a dozen others and negatively impact some or all of them — a huge problem where systems as important as the immigration platform and other essential services are concerned. “AppDynamics helped us address every issue in the newly developed system and everything we have digitized,” Mattar says. “Now that we have visibility across every application and the other applications it integrates with, we can pinpoint exactly where a problem is and rapidly determine how to fix it. We’ve eliminated virtually all downtime issues.”
“AppDynamics helped us become more proactive in our approach, allowing us to accelerate root cause analysis and redesign many applications to eliminate unnecessary dependencies and break points.”
Abdulrahman Mattar
Acting Chief of Government Systems Control, iGA Bahrain
With AppDynamics, the iGA team could evolve well beyond simply investigating incidents and outages as they happened. The full-stack observability capabilities provided an in-depth view into the dependencies causing performance issues across more than 35 integrated applications, helping to effectively map and visualize performance for faster resolution.
“In the past, we were very reactive, which impacted Bahrainis’ ability to access and use critical services,” Mattar explains. “AppDynamics helped us become more proactive in our approach, allowing us to accelerate root cause analysis and redesign many applications to eliminate unnecessary dependencies and break points.”
Improving collaboration and communication to deliver exceptional services
iGA is responsible for a substantial number of essential services the public depends on, and AppDynamics has been instrumental in helping the team collaborate to deliver them in a seamless and reliable manner.
“With AppDynamics, we’ve reduced incidents by about 80%. MTTR and application downtime have been significantly reduced too,” Mattar shares. “These performance optimizations allow us to focus less on whether an application is working and more on providing an exceptional user experience — especially when services are in high demand.”
Once the iGA team started using AppDynamics, they could respond more quickly to performance hits and rapidly reallocate resources, resulting in fewer service performance degradations and improved end user satisfaction. For example, when the Government of Bahrain announces school and university test results twice a year, tens of thousands of users need to access a national portal simultaneously, thus iGA reallocates resources proactively based on AppDynamics trend baseline.
“Even as we ramped up more applications and provided additional services, AppDynamics helped us continue to reduce incidents,” says Mattar. “Before we experienced a severe outage about once a month. Now we’ve had just two over the past year.”
Mattar says that AppDynamics has completely reshaped how the Authority approaches and manages its IT performance. “AppDynamics has become an essential tool for us to observe, react to, and manage any and every change that might affect application performance,” he says. “It has helped establish our whole department as a strategic leader while providing the capabilities we need to consistently deliver the experiences and services our citizens demand — and will continue to do so for years to come.”
About iGA Bahrain
Governments run on data and, for the Kingdom of Bahrain, most of that data runs through the Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA). The iGA acts as a service provider for all of Bahrain's government agencies and government services for healthcare, education, traffic and immigration. The iGA ensures the maintenance of all critical systems, delivers statistics, processes payments, and provides user authentications and authorizations.
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