Modernizing Medicine

Built from the ground up for the production environment, the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform proved a good fit for Modernizing Medicine. “You can only do so much with load testing. It doesn't tell you what happens in your real environment,” said Gresh. “And so when users are using the application in a way you didn't expect, or the critical path isn't the critical path you believed it to be, you don't have a load test for that.”

After deploying the AppDynamics APM solution, Modernizing Medicine not only continued to gain valuable data in load tests, but could now better understand how new code releases performed for customers. “Having instrumentation in the production environment that lets you see exactly where they're experiencing these slow calls, is a huge leg up,” he said.

The self-learning performance baselines—using intelligence gathered from continually monitoring site response times to adjust performance thresholds automatically—also set the AppDynamics APM solution apart from the competition. “That was another big selling point for AppDynamics,” added Gresh. “Even though on average the application is performing well, it's those outliers that people are concerned about,” said Gresh. “Those are the ones that get you your customer calls. We need those outliers.”

“The biggest advantage to AppDynamics for us has been identifying blind spots,” said Gresh. For example, when Modernizing Medicine customers were experiencing slower connection times, Gresh was able to use the AppDynamics solution to determine the source—an infrastructure, not application, problem—that might have otherwise gone undetected. “It turned out to be a setting on our load balancer,” recalled Gresh. “So we determined the load balancer had reached an artificial limit and we were able to greatly improve performance by changing that artificial limit.”

AppDynamics reduced MTTR and informed scaling decisions

“We’ve pretty much got it to the point now where we can confidently say within 10 to 15 minutes what is causing the problem,” said Gresh about improved MTTR at Modernizing Medicine. In addition, he said the data provided by AppDynamics has helped his department make more informed infrastructure decisions, “It's been a great go to tool for making arguments against scaling up.” AppDynamics improves infrastructure efficiency while maintaining a low overhead.

The value provided by the AppDynamics APM encouraged Modernizing Medicine to expand its use of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform. The company also deployed the AppDynamics Web End-User Experience Monitoring solution to better understand the UI level on the web. “It's absolutely fabulous that we can go and track by domain,” he said. “And now we're looking of course at the mobile app to see if that can help us determine where you're slow on your native iPad app.”

“I would recommend AppDynamics to companies that are growing rapidly and don't understand where their next scaling limit is going to be,” said Gresh. “I would also recommend it to companies that have currently had software releases that went bad on them—everybody's been there, where you have a performance problem that you just can't figure out.”