Challenge: Needed to optimize performance for a new system architecture
Due to their complex architecture, the Karavel Operations and Development teams found themselves facing a variety of issues, including site performance problems as a result of non-optimized SQL queries, open source framework performance bugs and resource leakages. They attempted to resolve these issues using logs as well as thread and memory dumps, but ended up with an average MTTR of more than three hours. Guillaume Postaire, Infrastructure Architect for Karavel noted, “Even after we resolved whatever problem we were dealing with, we still weren't finished firefighting. The resulting post-mortem analysis could take as long as a day. That's why we decided to go out to the market and evaluate application performance management solutions.” Karavel's team looked at a variety of application performance management (APM) solutions, but found they were hard-to-use, costly and unsuitable for the production environment. “We couldn't make a buying decision without having a Proof of Concept in our production environment, which is where we were worried about visibility and root cause analysis,” said Benoit Villaumie, Karavel's Lead Architect. “We found AppDynamics and asked for the 30-day trial license—which we received immediately after doing an online demo with a sales representative. AppDynamics had no problem giving us the trial license keys and logins and letting us do our own deployment in our production environment.”
