Velliv
Velliv brings certainty, security and performance to pension planning with AppDynamics
Key benefits
Reduced time-to-resolution from several hours to under five minutes
Enhanced financial service availability for more than 400,000 customers
Holistic coverage of cloud and traditional environments, APIs and third-party services
With 800 employees and 400,000 customers, Velliv is one of the largest commercial pension companies in Denmark. Using AppDynamics, the company gains deep, granular insights into its cloud-first IT infrastructure to manage platform behavior and improve the overall customer experience.
“AppDynamics gives us the actionable intelligence to create more stable systems with predictable performance and availability."
Peter Hvedstrup Jensen
Head of IT Operations, Velliv
Challenge
Velliv wanted to create scalable cloud-only infrastructure and gain visibility into each component of its environment to accelerate troubleshooting, improve performance and enhance the customer experience.
Solution
AppDynamics helps Velliv gain critical visibility at transaction points across its cloud native infrastructure to proactively address performance and availability issues before they impact the customer experience.
Results
Velliv achieved rapid, context-based root cause analysis to identify issues in minutes, drastically reducing downtime while optimizing capacity and creating a holistic view of each stage of the customer experience.
"While most monitoring and observability solutions promise out-of-the- box capabilities that they don’t actually deliver, AppDynamics has all the features, functionality and expert support we need to continue refining and improving our operations for years to come."
Peter Hvedstrup Jensen
Head of IT Operations, Velliv
Challenge
More clouds and complexity demand better visibility
As one of Denmark’s largest financial services organizations, Velliv is a one-stop shop for Danes seeking to protect the assets they already have while saving and planning for the future. Formerly part of Nordea, the largest financial investment group in the Nordics, Velliv provides a wide range of insurance, investing and pension solutions to more than 400,000 Danes.
Managing people’s livelihoods and financial well-being — especially when customers’ pensions fund the operation — is more than just providing detailed savings plans. In Velliv’s case, it's also about developing a new, cloud native business model that could make information easily and reliably accessible to clients for a high-touch, seamless customer experience.
“As a pension provider, it’s imperative that every system, component and application work flawlessly. Our customers shouldn't have to wait to find the information they need or repeatedly visit an application that's unexpectedly not available,” says Peter Hvedstrup Jensen, Head of IT Operations at Velliv. “A cloud-only architecture can be very complex and intricate. We needed greater visibility and control over every aspect of the environment because even an hour of downtime will negatively impact our customers.”
Step-by-step observability across cloud platforms and mission-critical applications
Working with implementation partner Moonskye, Velliv implemented AppDynamics to support a new cloud native organization, enable rapid development of new services while enhancing existing ones, and create a reliably consistent user experience across platforms and endpoints.
Employing a cloud-only strategy, the company doesn’t own or operate a data center, but instead relies on a combination of public cloud solutions from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure to house and run its core operations.
“Pension management is a trust-based service and our customers rely heavily on self-service portals and other tools to manage their investments,” Peter Hvedstrup Jensen explains. “As our business grows, so does the ecosystem. AppDynamics gives us the actionable intelligence to create more stable systems with predictable performance and availability. This makes it easier for our internal teams to manage these systems no matter where they live, and provide a more consistent experience for our end customers.”
“With AppDynamics we can isolate and evaluate individual transactions down to particular lines of code on specific servers, and better understand where performance issues might be.”
Anders Damkjær Møller
Incident and Problem Manager, Velliv
With AppDynamics, Peter Hvedstrup Jensen’s team can proactively monitor every network, API and third-party service to rapidly pinpoint and troubleshoot issues before they become full-blown problems for both internal IT users and pension customers. In particular, the company uses AppDynamics to instrument its systems and applications, utilizing customizable dashboards, precise contextual alerting, and AI-powered root cause analysis to zero in on active or potential issues — dramatically improving mean time to identify and resolve.
“With AppDynamics we can isolate and evaluate individual transactions down to particular lines of code on specific servers, and better understand where performance issues might be,” says Anders Damkjær Møller, Velliv’s Incident and Problem Manager. “Now we can measure and visualize exactly how many seconds each step takes and how issues at the application, hardware and network levels impact the overall performance and availability of essential services. It’s a much more data-driven, fact-based approach to managing complex systems and supporting a continuously good customer experience.”
Superior responsiveness for enhanced customer experiences
AppDynamics has helped reshape how Velliv and its partners monitor the pension firm's essential infrastructure, the applications they support and the customer experience.
“The great thing about AppDynamics is that it’s easy to instrument data collection across different applications and the various cloud platforms in ways you can’t really do with other off-the-shelf tools,” says Søren Boyum, Moonskye’s managing partner. “AppDynamics does all of that while also correlating the information into something meaningful and helpful to the business.”
Peter Hvedstrup Jensen says the biggest benefit to the organization is how much it can accelerate the analysis of where and when baseline changes occur, illustrate how these changes might impact availability and performance, and identify and troubleshoot root causes faster.
“We used to spend as much as seven hours searching for root causes when something went wrong and took internal systems and customer-facing portals offline,” he says. “With AppDynamics, we can pinpoint exactly where a problem occurs and what other systems or applications it impacts — even if it’s something we’ve never seen before — and fix it in under five minutes.”
While Velliv’s agile developers are primary users of AppDynamics in its service development, Peter Hvedstrup Jensen anticipates adding support for mainframe and other teams in the near future.
“While most monitoring and observability solutions promise out-of-the-box capabilities that they don’t actually deliver, AppDynamics has all the features, functionality and expert support we need to continue refining and improving our operations for years to come.”
About Velliv
Velliv, Pension & Livsforsikring AS (Velliv) provides pension solutions for both individual and corporate customers, serving nearly 400,000 Danes. Founded in 2019 after years of functioning under the Nordic Bank corporate umbrella, the firm employs approximately 800 workers across the organization and provides savings and pension planning advice to customers from all walks of life and at any stage of their journey.
About Moonskye
Moonskye is a consulting house dedicated to full-stack observability. The company is 100% committed to AppDynamics from Cisco, and all of its consultants are AppDynamics Black Belt certified with many years of experience in application performance monitoring (APM). The firm is based north of Copenhagen, Denmark but offers consultancy services to customers across Scandinavia. Moonskye is on a mission to ensure that its customers get the most value from AppDynamics.
Resources
View all resources
AppDynamics Cloud launches at Cisco Live
Cisco debuts AppDynamics' all-new observability platform that cuts through the complexity of modern applications to give technologists a seamless, unified view of their cloud native technology landscape.
Innovate with confidence
Correlating hybrid cloud app performance to digital experiences and business decisions enables you to innovate with the confidence that your cloud investments will drive real customer and business value.
Cut the chaos with AppDynamics Full Stack Observability
Observe what matters by understanding the connection between your app’s health, your users’ satisfaction and your business results.
8 essential questions to ask when evaluating an APM solution
Investing in application performance management (APM) is a critical step in ensuring your applications continue to meet the expectations of your end-users.