Works Applications Co., Ltd.

Works Applications Co., Ltd. relies on AppDynamics to help rapidly resolve performance degradation in SaaS applications

Key benefits


Reduced Mean Time to Identify and Resolution from one week to several minutes


Reduced SRE department's time issue resolution by one-third to one-half


Provided proactive operation management for app developers and QA engineers



Works Applications Co., Ltd., a major Japanese domestic ERP HUE series provider, implemented AppDynamics to be more proactive against anomalies and errors, which was essential for its transformation to a SaaS provider rather than a legacy package vendor.

“When I first used AppDynamics, I was surprised that it could display function-level performance without any configuration required."

Hayato Shiraiwa
Operation Div. Ac SRE Department Manager, Works Applications Enterprise Co., Ltd.

Challenge

To deliver a service level of 99% for the ERP applications provided to customers, Works Applications needs to manage problems such as performance degradation quickly before customer complaints are received.

Solution

Works Applications implemented AppDynamics for a granular level of data and environment visibility. The SRE team can now easily perform troubleshooting from the dashboards of web browsers.

Results

Issue resolution time was dramatically reduced by pinpointing the causes of the performance degradation. In addition to improving department productivity, the SRE team improved product reliability further by proactively addressing problems.

"For us to transform into a cloud service vendor, we have believed from the beginning of HUE's development that we should target a mechanism that could proactively address problems as they arise as our priority"


Masahiko Miyahara
Representative Director, Works Applications Enterprise Co., Ltd.

Challenge

Troubleshooting via trial and error

Works Applications Co., Ltd. (Works Applications) provides applications and recently added SaaS services to help companies improve productivity in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and groupware. The company is a pioneer in domestic ERP with its flagship product, "HUE," which utilizes cloud infrastructure. It continues to evolve as an add-on-free ERP solution that can be adapted to the operations of many companies and can incorporate change requests from companies into its standard functions.

"Since its launch, HUE has been providing customers with a comprehensive solution, from application delivery to maintenance and operations of its platform, based on the three concepts of no customization, free version upgrades, and high functional coverage." says Masahiko Miyahara, Representative Director of Works Applications Enterprise. He is responsible for the development, distribution, and support of this service.

The company's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) division plays a vital role in supporting the stable operation of HUE. This division was established to improve the quality of services based on the application characteristics, including the operation and maintenance of the HUE infrastructures. While HUE provides customers with new features corresponding with revisions to laws and the latest technology, unexpected glitches, failures, and performance degradation can occur. Even the SRE division does not have extensive knowledge related to unknown problems, so it is not always possible to resolve them quickly.

"For example, suppose a customer informs us that performance degraded after a new feature was delivered. To identify the cause, we had to start by interviewing customers about the usage status of HUE. We used various methods to collect information, such as Oracle Statspack, Java thread dumps, and DB queries. We thoroughly inspected the contents, then searched for the causes of the delay,” explains Hayato Shiraiwa, AC SRE Department Manager for Works Applications.

Even if the team modified the source code to improve performance, it might take a week or two for the issues to be resolved. When various investigations did not resolve the problems, they sometimes had to add more infrastructure resources at an extra cost.

Furthermore, many performance degradation problems had been discovered through customer feedback. There was a growing need internally for the development and SRE teams to be able to detect problems by themselves.

"For us to transform into a cloud service vendor, we have believed from the beginning of HUE's development that we should target a mechanism that could proactively address problems as they arise," says Masahiko.

Solution

AppDynamics quickly identifies the causes of delays

Several key application performance management (APM) products, including AppDynamics, were selected as candidates for comparison for the implementation of a proactive problem detection mechanism.

"The cause of application performance degradation is not necessarily the infrastructure. It is also an important indicator for developers and the quality control department. Therefore, when implementing APM, we focus on making it possible for anyone, even non-infrastructure engineers, to understand application tracking and transactions intuitively. Of course, after detecting problems, it is vital to be able to investigate the causes and immediately start responding to them," says Hayato of his product selection criterion.

 

Before the full-scale implementation of AppDynamics, Works Applications conducted Proof of Value (PoV) to confirm actual usability. "When I first used AppDynamics, I was surprised that it could display function-level performance without any configuration. I could check the performance of the customer's system usage without having to go out and get data," Hayato recalls. The AppDynamics PoV was highly regarded for its ability to visualize detailed information, such as how many milliseconds each Java process took and why a particular code stopped processing.

“When implementing APM, we focused on making it possible for anyone, even non-infrastructure engineers, to understand application tracking and transactions intuitively.”

Hayato Shiraiwa
Operation Div. Ac SRE Department Manager, Works Applications Enterprise Co., Ltd.

Also, with ERP products like HUE, large amounts of data are stored in a DB, so DB performance is critical for providing stable quality services to customers. Therefore, the visibility of the connection between the DB and the application is particularly important.

"AppDynamics made it easy to understand what queries are generated from applications to which DBs. When the DB response lags, you can now check the DB execution plan from the browser instead of using the Oracle Statspack as before. We felt it was very convenient because the necessary information could be grasped easily from the AppDynamics UI,” says Hayato.

Works Applications partially implemented AppDynamics in 2016, two years after the start of HUE development.  As the company began expanding the SaaS business in 2020, it fully implemented AppDynamics in July of the same year after evaluating APM products.

“ The impact of the current implementation is merely a passing point. We aim to move from simple monitoring to business observability to provide new value to customers.”

Masahiko Miyahara
Representative Director, Works Applications Enterprise Co., Ltd.

Benefits

AppDynamics greatly reduced the MTTR across the platform

The implementation of AppDynamics has made it easier to identify the causes of problems, including application performance degradation, resulting in various positive results. The SRE department’s time spent resolving issues was reduced to about one-third to one-half of what it used to be. This allowed the SRE department to focus more on automating its infrastructure's operation and maintenance and improving its service quality. 

"AppDynamics centrally and automatically accumulates customer DB and application performance metrics and traces, eliminating the need to collect various levels of logs manually. Simply drilling down in the AppDynamics dashboard allows us to identify the causes of delays easily. In some cases, the task of identifying causes, which used to take nearly a week to identify, can be completed within minutes,” says Hayato. "Additionally, the SRE department is now able to quickly respond to questions and inquiries based on the root cause analysis with evidence such as correlation of application delays to a problem with infrastructure performance and provide clear answers regarding the causes.

When a certain threshold is exceeded, AppDynamics can automatically send notifications about monitored metrics. The company sends these notifications to stakeholders via chats. This helps developers and the quality control department to detect problems immediately and address them proactively.

In this way, AppDynamics has been helpful for operation management, such as monitoring applications and DBs and identifying the causes of performance degradation. "This is not just a monitoring tool. We want to analyze the data stored in AppDynamics and use it to improve our business, such as by determining how to grow our services and how to use it to solve customers' business problems," says Hayato. Furthermore, Masahiko adds, "The impact of the current implementation is merely a passing point. We aim to move from simple monitoring to business observability to provide new value to customers."

About Works Applications

Works Applications Co., Ltd., an IT company in its 26th year of existence in Japan, has a philosophy of maximizing the efficiency of the IT investments of domestic companies to increase "corporate productivity" and contribute to the expansion of its corporate value. The company’s flagship product, "HUE," has been implemented by approximately 2,200 companies, primarily large organizations.

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