Fast, easy, and human banking

Migros Bank was founded on the principle of putting people first and helping customers make better financial decisions with fast, easy, and human banking. As the market has become more digitalized, the bank wanted to bring more of its customers online, while still reflecting its values by providing reliable and intuitive digital banking services. These services are powered by applications built on a hybrid technology stack compromised of an on-premises private cloud environment running on Kubernetes and RedHat OpenShift, as well as a legacy mainframe.

The complexity of this hybrid technology stack made it challenging for Migros Bank to understand how backend changes impacted front-end experiences on its digital banking platforms, including critical processes such as customer onboarding and e-banking. Migros Bank’s services rely on multiple third-party applications as well as its own in-house software, but to date, these had remained a ‘black box.’ The bank needed end-to-end visibility across its entire application stack so its teams could collaborate effectively both internally and with external suppliers to find solutions when problems arise.

Eliminating silos for faster innovation and optimized experiences

Migros Bank needed a platform that could provide end-to-end visibility by consolidating all observability data – including from third-party applications and all user devices – in one place to drive fast, informed decisions.  After surveying the market, the bank chose Dynatrace for its easy deployment, real-time discovery, and all-in-one platform that could serve as a continuous and consistent source-of-truth and empower DevSecOps and business teams to collaborate more effectively. The immediate impact of these benefits has led the bank to use Dynatrace elsewhere in the business, such as leveraging its automation capabilities to improve the quality and speed of releases.

“With Dynatrace, we are now working based on facts, not assumptions. As a result, we’re spending less time searching for the cause of issues, and instead getting on with working together to solve them,” commented Paul Zimmermann, Head of System Engineering Migros Bank. “The ability to quickly solve issues related to our customer onboarding process and e-banking platform was just the start of our success with Dynatrace – we’re now using it to optimize experiences at every stage of the user journey, to ensure all transactions run smoothly.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Enhanced customer onboarding: Dynatrace provides end-to-end visibility into the applications and infrastructure underpinning Migros Bank’s digital services. This enables teams to connect the dots visually across every touchpoint between users and backend code, as well as third-party software, so they can proactively optimize services and improve onboarding processes to boost conversions.
• Enhanced customer experiences: Before Dynatrace, Migros Bank’s teams would spend quite some time understanding a problem before they were able to resolve it. Now, with Dynatrace’s automation and AIOps capabilities, teams can identify the root-cause instantly, so they can focus on a resolution. As a result, the time taken to resolve issues has more than halved, improving the bank’s reputation for providing flawless customer experiences.
• Increased operational agility: Dynatrace has broken down silos between internal departments and provided visibility into third-party services in a single, holistic source of data-driven truth. This is helping to drive a more agile DevSecOps culture, which improves collaboration and drives greater speed and success in the bank’s efforts to deliver seamless digital services to customers.
• Accelerated release cycles: Migros Bank’s DevSecOps teams leverage Dynatrace’s automation capabilities to drive faster, higher quality releases. For example, they can now analyze releases with quality gates, and use synthetic tests to see how customers might be affected by changes, which can be easily rolled back if there are any issues. This prevents bad, vulnerable code from reaching production, creating a more reliable online banking experience for customers. Automation has ultimately resulted in faster, higher quality release cycles, which will help Migros Bank solidify its place as a digital market leader.

“Dynatrace is our problem-solving machine. It has helped us make significant improvements to our customer conversions and onboarding,” commented Hasan Girit, System Engineer Migros Bank. “As we continue to develop innovative new services for our customers, Dynatrace will be key for monitoring, testing, and optimizing those services, so they are the best they can be when they reach our customers.”

“We see Dynatrace as a strategic partner for Migros Bank. It offers excellent support even at short notice and during tricky situations”, comments Stephan Wick, COO/CIO Migros Bank. “The partnership has been crucial to delivering our services around digitalization to our business functions, which resulted in the recent recognition by the Institute for Financial Services Zug (IFZ) that Migros Bank offers the most advanced and customer friendly digitalized banking services in Switzerland.”

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Driving digital first banking

As one of North America’s largest banks, BMO has adopted a digital first strategy to power financial progress and continually meet the needs of its customers in a rapidly evolving market. The strategy is centered around technology-led innovation that delivers reimagined banking services and drives best-in-class customer experiences while optimizing operating efficiencies. This helps to free up scarce human resources, enabling employees to focus on delivering expert advice and strategic innovation. Through these initiatives, BMO aims to drive enhanced systems availability and business growth while enhancing customer loyalty.

To support this, BMO relies on a hybrid technology stack spanning on-premises data centers and public cloud services. This allows it to retain security over its most sensitive data and applications, while leveraging the economies of scale of the cloud. To support its teams’ ability to resolve issues, optimize customers’ digital journeys, and personalize their banking experiences, BMO wanted to unlock real-time insights from the enormous volume and variety of observability data being produced across this dynamic and distributed technology stack. However, traditional approaches to log analytics would make it difficult to access timely insights and create a productivity drain due to the reliance on time-consuming manual processes.

Boosting trust through data-driven insights

BMO needed a more automated solution with AI capabilities that would enable its teams to surface real-time insights that can be used to drive innovation and boost trust. After evaluating the market, BMO identified Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs, due to its Grail™ data lakehouse. The ability to store all observability data in context and conduct log analytics near instantaneously and at scale with Grail made Dynatrace the ideal solution.

“To enable our digital-first strategy and deliver speed, innovation, and efficiency, we needed to minimize the disruption caused by system issues or downtime,” said Rohan Shah, Senior Manager for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), BMO. “The combined power of Dynatrace’s Grail and its causal and predictive AI capabilities has enabled our team to fully embrace the principles of SRE and respond with record speed when issues occur, by allowing us to quickly understand what’s happening in our systems.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Increased customer trust and loyalty: With the AI-powered answers underpinned by Grail, BMO has dramatically improved the speed at which its teams can identify and respond to issues in the digital customer journey. This has helped BMO’s teams to dramatically reduce Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) issues, and slashed root cause analysis (RCA) time by 80%. As a result, BMO can provide continuous service availability for the customers and communities it serves, helping to drive greater trust and loyalty.
• More reliable banking: Manual log analytics processes that previously took BMO’s teams up to 45 minutes now take 5 seconds with Dynatrace. This has eliminated around 60 hours of manual toil every month per team and enabled dramatic improvements in how quickly the teams can diagnose and act on an issue. This approach is being shared and reused across BMO’s Technology, Resiliency, and Experience Operations team, to support its wider efforts to deliver consistent banking services.
• Faster innovation with lower risk: Dynatrace provides a perfect platform to support SRE practices and facilitate experimentation that will help BMO to deliver on its digital first strategy. With the real-time answers from Dynatrace’s Grail and the platform’s AI capabilities, BMO’s teams can quickly understand issues associated with changes or new services they introduce and instantly roll back if they need to, enabling a faster pace of innovation with reduced risk. This capability has also freed up approximately 40 hours of additional time for each team every month, so they can focus on driving innovation rather than reacting to problems.
• Greater operational efficiency: Dynatrace’s ecosystem integrations have opened the door for BMO to accelerate its journey towards a self-healing applications strategy to drive further efficiency. BMO is looking to route the data-backed answers from Grail into an ITSM solution to automatically generate support tickets with information on the root cause embedded and send them to the relevant team to act on. The goal is to use this approach to trigger an automated workflow to resolve the issue without the need for any manual intervention.

“In a complex technological environment, it’s very easy for a sudden change to cause things to break,” continued Shah. “Dynatrace has enabled us to dramatically reduce this timeframe through near-instant identification of an issue and its root cause. Dynatrace is invaluable in BMO’s journey to become a data-driven organization, harnessing unified observability and powerful AI capabilities to accelerate innovation and deliver flawless digital experiences.”

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Building a modern travel experience

Digital systems are at the heart of Aeroporti di Roma’s (ADR) efficiency, underpinning all critical airport processes that keep travelers moving, including security checks, border control, baggage handling, airside operations, and traveler information systems such as those used for check-in and travel updates.

ADR relied on multiple third-party systems integrators to share information on the performance of software and its impact on travelers’ experiences and satisfaction. However, this reliance on multiple systems and third parties, manual triaging, and no single source of truth complicated efforts to resolve issues quickly or optimize experiences. Having just one critical application offline for a few minutes could lead to huge queues at check-in, border control, or baggage handling desks, risking travelers missing their flights. To create best-in-class airport experiences for passengers, ADR needed an in-house observability and security platform that could unify data from across its hybrid-cloud environment.

Seamless integration and automation

ADR selected Dynatrace for the platform’s ability to unify observability and security data from its on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Dynatrace’s extensive automation capabilities would enable ADR to optimize its services and resolve issues, without time-consuming manual human intervention. ADR was also attracted by Dynatrace’s ability to seamlessly integrate with its existing IT Service Management solution. Dynatrace automatically creates tickets when it discovers problems, identifies the root cause, and instantly routes them to the right team within ADR to facilitate proactive resolution.

“Having all our data in the Dynatrace platform enables us to optimize and safeguard the systems our customers rely on easily and proactively. That means we can create a better airport experience for our travelers and, ultimately, get more of them to their destination on time,” said Emiliano Sorrenti, Chief Information and Technology Officer at ADR.

Life with Dynatrace

• Unparalleled travel experiences: Precise AI-powered answers from Dynatrace help ADR automatically uncover the root-cause of bottlenecks in critical applications so teams can continuously optimize airport experiences. This capability has enabled ADR to keep travelers flowing through its airports quickly and efficiently, including processing 90% of travelers through security in 3 minutes, enabling punctual arrivals and departures for more than 99% of daily flights*, and guaranteeing that 13 million bags reach more than 200 destinations each year.Thanks to these service levels, Fiumicino Airport was recently rated “Best Airport in Europe with Over 40 million Passengers” by Airports Council International (ACI) for the sixth consecutive year. Fiumicino also received a 5-Star Airport Rating from Skytrax earlier this year, making it the second European airport to achieve this rating.
• Improved operational efficiency: Dynatrace seamlessly integrates with ADR’s existing IT Service Management solution. It automatically creates tickets when it discovers problems and instantly routes them to the right team within ADR, along with precise root cause analysis, to facilitate proactive resolution. This has reduced the time teams spend triaging issues by 70%.
• Faster vulnerability resolution: Dynatrace alerts ADR to any new security vulnerabilities as they emerge in its environments, while automatically prioritizing them based on the risk to the airports’ systems and travelers. These insights enable the ADR team to resolve vulnerabilities quickly, minimizing airport disruption. For many types of incidents, ADR has even been able to use Dynatrace’s AI capabilities to create automated workflows that enable applications to self-heal without the need for human intervention

“Dynatrace has revolutionized how we manage service incidents and software vulnerabilities, enabling us to deliver seamless airport journeys for our travelers,” continued Sorrenti. “Automation from Dynatrace has improved the reliability and security of our critical airport services. We’ve eliminated the manual toil from vulnerability scans and triaging problems. Instead, the answers from Dynatrace empower us to jump straight into a resolution with our partners. Ultimately, that keeps travelers flowing through our airports with ease.”

*Based on ADR records from Jan – Mar 2023. The indicator does not include delays caused by third parties that are outside of ADR’s direct control, such as late arrival of incoming flights or problems with individual airlines. When taking these external factors into account, overall punctuality for the same period is 83% for arrivals and 78% for departures.

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Delivering critical public services is key to building trust

The State of Minnesota government delivers critical public services to about 5.75 million Minnesotans. Many essential services are accessible online, including the Department of Employment and Economic Development’s unemployment insurance. This service provides partial wage replacement and job search support to constituents who have found themselves unemployed and assists employers with handling wages and claims.

As part of the State’s digital strategy, it aims to build trust with constituents by cementing its reputation for providing secure, timely, and high-quality services. However, it faced challenges meeting this objective as the IT department worked in a series of sub teams, creating silos that led to a lack of transparency and inefficiency. Each sub team, from database administrators to the middleware team, had access to different monitoring data and relied on verbal communication for progress updates or to learn about critical issues. With this approach, it could take days to resolve complex problems, which negatively impacted the constituent experience and staff morale.

Eliminating silos to improve team collaboration

The State of Minnesota’s IT team needed a new approach to managing the performance and availability of its applications. It selected Dynatrace due to its automatic and intelligent observability capabilities. With Dynatrace, all IT teams would have access to the same data, eliminating silos and promoting a more cohesive and collaborative workplace. Dynatrace’s continuous monitoring would also enable teams to be more proactive in managing the applications by giving them critical information on any issues in real-time and helping resolve them before they impact constituents.

“Our siloed approach was becoming a roadblock for us in meeting our goals of delivering excellent online services,” says Kailey Smith, Application Architect, State of Minnesota IT Services. “We had a transparency issue—asking a team to verbally explain what data they are seeing is not the same as seeing it for yourself. Dynatrace provides full visibility across our entire environment, enabling us all to work together in solving problems efficiently and update our business partners more easily.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Greater visibility: Dynatrace provides IT teams with a single source of truth displayed in real-time dashboards, breaking down silos and fostering better working relationships. Technology and business teams see the same data and assess problems collectively, promoting greater collaboration and cohesion across the organization. Business partners can now immediately understand issues in real time and see what measures teams are taking to resolve them.
• Faster resolution: Dynatrace’s AIOps and automation capabilities enable teams to identify root cause and resolve issues more swiftly. On average, teams have reduced their resolution times for complex problems from 2-3 days to just 2-3 hours, while simpler issues now take 15-20 minutes to resolve, instead of a few hours. This efficiency gain has resulted in significant average cost savings of 85% per incident, delivering substantial return on investment.
• Higher staff retention: Dynatrace’s ability to eliminate fire drills and repetitive tasks has increased motivation among staff. Many teams are required to support multiple applications and divisions across the department. Dynatrace’s intelligent observability eases the burden by saving them time, freeing them up for more meaningful work and giving them more work satisfaction. With real-time insights at their fingertips, teams can be laser-focused on solving problems, resulting in less stress, and reducing the need for overtime.
• Enhanced citizen experiences: With Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability capabilities, teams can now ensure the State of Minnesota is able to deliver timely services to citizens when they are most affected. Dynatrace helps teams identify bugs in the code before it is deployed to production, improving performance and availability levels, and delivering a more reliable experience for end users.

“Dynatrace enables us to do more with less,” says Kailey. “It instills confidence that we can fully support our applications, meet all our SLAs, and deliver what the business wants. Dynatrace has also been important to talent retention at the State of Minnesota. When staff are excited, they have more time to innovate, and they want to stay with us. Ultimately, with Dynatrace, we feel confident we can meet the needs of citizens who expect and deserve a great digital experience.”

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Enhancing the customer experience and driving new digital revenues

UK-based restaurant and pub operator Mitchells and Butlers (M&B) is on a mission to digitally transform. As the company emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic and reopened its 1,700 locations across the UK, it continues to identify new opportunities for growth. With the UK home delivery market expanding, M&B wanted to drive new digital revenue streams by establishing its own virtual brands, while continuing to deliver excellent customer experiences in its traditional venues.

To achieve these goals, M&B needed more extensive observability and business analytics across its environment. The company had adopted Dynatrace at the onset of the digital expansion and therefore had access to an automatic and intelligent observability solution, but it now needed to extend these capabilities even further to unlock new insights.

Deeper insights to support exponential growth

When initially selecting an observability solution, M&B was particularly impressed by Dynatrace’s causal AI engine, Davis, due to its ability to provide real time answers about the cause and solution to any performance issues. Following the exceptional results achieved with these capabilities – including the achievement of 100% application availability – M&B chose to extend its use of the platform. It chose to begin using Dynatrace’s new Grail data lakehouse technology, to access powerful business analytics.

“Since the pandemic, we’ve experienced exponential growth in the delivery market,” says Mark Forrester, Digital Readiness Manager at M&B. “Use of our apps and online platform has also increased, with customers using it to do everything from booking tables to ordering food and drink. Dynatrace had already helped us perfect the order-at-table customer experience, where we saw a 20% increase in purchase value compared to bar orders. As we grew and added new digital revenue streams, it was imperative that we continued to deliver excellent customer experiences and we knew Dynatrace could provide the insights we needed.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster integrations with delivery partners: M&B was the first UK chain to have its own API layer, which means orders from third-party delivery companies, such as Deliveroo, Just Eat, and Uber Eats, flow directly into the restaurant group’s point-of-sale systems. Insights from Dynatrace enabled M&B to speed up the rollout of these integrations with delivery companies, giving the company a significant competitive advantage.
• Deeper insights and real-time reporting: With the business events data captured in Grail, Dynatrace is providing M&B with answers to critical business questions at the click of a button, saving teams valuable time. Teams can now produce unreconciled insight reports on areas such as sales revenue that are accurate to the penny in real time, or weekly totals of staff tips from digital services. Previously, M&B would have had to gather data from each of the 1,700 outlets and collate it into one report—a time-consuming process. With Dynatrace’s Grail technology and automation, the data is extracted and waiting for consumption automatically.
• Solve elusive and costly issues: Dynatrace Grail has also helped M&B identify and resolve an issue that led to ‘ghost orders’, which had eluded its team for years. In these situations, a customer payment would be declined due to a POS system failure, yet the order would still go through and come to their table. By finding and resolving the cause of these ghost orders, M&B has improved customer service by eliminating the confusion this may have caused and can better protect its bottom line.
• Supporting new digital revenue streams: Using Dynatrace’s AI-powered insights, M&B has been able to launch a range of virtual brands—delivery-only food outlets utilizing their existing restaurant kitchens – to tap into a rapidly growing market. Dynatrace has helped M&B streamline these virtual brands’ business processes and track the end-to-end user journey, from placing an order to delivery. Teams can see how many orders are going through in real time and quickly identify and resolve any issues or transaction failures.
• Deliver better customer experiences: Dynatrace alerts teams to issues with third-party apps so they can pass on the information immediately to ensure continuous performance and availability. Previously, teams would need to wait for external developers to identify issues, resulting in an app being down for extended periods.

“Dynatrace has helped Mitchells and Butlers complement its traditional bricks-and-mortar bar and restaurant company with a growing, innovative, digital business,” says Forrester. “As we have evolved, so has our use of the Dynatrace platform. By adding Grail, we have gained a profound level of insight into our business, enabling us to overcome challenges with ease, streamline our processes and meet our ambitious growth plans. All of this would have been a lot harder without Dynatrace.”

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Driven to be the premier county in Florida by building trust with citizens

With the goal of becoming the premier county in Florida, Pasco County has made it a strategic objective to deliver services that exceed customer expectations in a manner that builds trust, inspires confidence, and promotes accountability. With a growing population of digitally savvy citizens, it was critical to ensure that the county’s digital services are world-class, reliable, and resilient. As it continued to digitize its services to achieve this aim, the county also faced an increased risk from cybersecurity threats as digital transformation inevitably expanded the attack surface. As a result, Pasco County needed to adopt measures to ensure the integrity of its systems and protect sensitive citizen data that could be used for fraudulent activity.

To achieve these aims, Pasco County needed to modernize its internal operations and security processes. Teams previously worked in silos with their own toolsets, leading to blind spots and lack of effective collaboration, both internally and with the agency’s service providers. They also relied on complex manual processes, which increased the risk of problems that could impact citizen experiences and allow vulnerabilities to leave systems exposed. As a result, they were constantly in fire-drill mode, as they worked to hold service providers accountable for SLAs and to deliver seamless experiences for citizens. This made it more difficult to ensure services were available 24/7, hindering Pasco County’s mission and impacting its ability to build trust and enhance the agency’s reputation amongst constituents.

Adopting a proactive and intelligent approach

Pasco County set up an integrated network operations and security center (INSOC) that would enable its teams to collaborate more effectively both internally and externally. This would help them shift from being reactive to proactive in addressing problems and ensure uninterrupted service delivery for constituents. To enable this, the County needed a platform that would serve as a digital backbone, providing end-to-end visibility and a consolidated view across its environment, and automate its manual operations and security processes. The team also sought a solution that could provide real-time insights into how users interacted with the County’s systems and applications, so they could understand how they could improve the experience for both citizens and employees. They also wanted to hold their vendors accountable for delivering secure code. After a thorough evaluation of the market, the team identified Dynatrace as the best solution for its requirements.

“Lack of visibility was preventing us from identifying issues and the root cause quickly and efficiently, leading to problems coming back to bite us again and again,” says Bert Bertagna, Assistant Chief Information Officer, Pasco County. “Before Dynatrace, we could easily go upwards of 12 hours before we realized there was a user impacting issue. Now, teams get alerted and can immediately take pre-emptive action which avoids a complete system outage or failure.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Enhanced customer satisfaction: With Dynatrace, Pasco County sees exactly how constituents and internal users navigate its services. This provides teams with the insights that enable them to prioritize new projects and programs that help to create world-class experiences for constituents and deliver additional value to the organization. As a result, Pasco County has been able to bolster customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores in various categories by up to six percentage points.
• Better citizen experiences: As the backbone of Pasco County’s INSOC, Dynatrace’s AIOps capabilities provide deep insight into the root cause of any problems instantly. This helps teams hold vendors accountable for ensuring 99.999% service availability. Dynatrace’s application security capabilities also give Pasco County real time, continuous, automatic vulnerability analysis and protection across all layers of the stack, including integrated vendor systems. This empowers teams to identify security issues before they go to production and prioritize efforts to remediate vulnerabilities based on the risk to citizens’ data. Within 12 months of deploying Dynatrace, the team reduced the number of critical, user-impacting incidents by more than 50%.
• Improved staff morale: Dynatrace’s AIOps capabilities eliminate fire drills and reduce wasted manual effort for Pasco County’s teams, enabling them to enjoy a better work/life balance and spend more time with their families, improving morale and retention. As a result, they are free to focus more of their efforts on strategic work that advances the department’s mission to improve government services and build trust with constituents.
• Pre-emptive response: Dynatrace is enabling Pasco County to drive more efficient operations and pre-emptive incident response as the digital backbone by consolidating monitoring capabilities and breaking down silos between teams both internally and externally. By bringing teams together and uniting them around a single source of truth, Pasco County has reduced the costs and wasted effort of service management and enhanced collaboration, helping them to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) by more than 50% in the first 12 months.

“Dynatrace has become the anchor for our INSOC and has improved our focus on service availability and quality,” Bert says. “The platform gives us complete visibility, enabling us to move from being reactive to proactive, and in many cases predictive in our efforts to enhance service availability and quality. That means our teams aren’t constantly in fire drill mode, and they’re more empowered to focus on innovation and delivering experiences that boost our constituents’ trust in government services. Dynatrace is central to our mission to make Pasco County the premier government services provider in the state.”

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Delivering efficient and seamless travel experiences

Spirit Airlines is working to expand its network by adding brand new planes and increasing the number of destinations it flies to throughout the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean. With a mantra of More Go, the airline offers high value flights at very affordable prices, while delivering an excellent guest experience. Its technology team manages many mission-critical applications that power the airline’s customer experience and support its internal operations.

Spirit uses various cloud-based online and mobile commercial applications that support customer self-service options, from booking flights and managing trips to self-check-in and baggage-tag printing. Additionally, the team oversees operational applications that are used to manage the fleet and maintenance crews. Teams need to resolve issues in these applications quickly, using capabilities beyond the traditional eyes-on-screen monitoring procedures. They also sought increased visibility into the customer journey and the third-party applications that are integrated with its services.

Extending observability to enhance the digital guest journey

The Spirit team sought an end-to-end observability solution to support its ambitious growth plans and meet guest expectations for seamless experiences. It turned to Dynatrace due to its answer-driven automation and digital experience monitoring capabilities, which could provide insight into Spirit’s hybrid technology stack and the digital guest journey. Dynatrace also provides extended oversight of external platforms such as third-party booking websites.

“Dynatrace offered all the capabilities we needed in a monitoring solution and more,” says Sagi Varghese, Senior Director for IT Services at Spirit. “Its features enable us to have deep insights into the guest experience. Such valuable data enables us to respond to variations in digital guest experience quickly. With Dynatrace, we can also map out external dependencies to the digital guest experience.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster resolution times: Dynatrace’s automatic and continuous discovery capabilities are utilized by Spirit to maintain constant visibility into its entire application stack. Its trustworthy AIOps and automation capabilities give teams confidence that their environment is under constant vigilance, eliminating the need for labor-intensive manual monitoring techniques.
• Valuable insights into third-party services: Dynatrace not only maps out Spirit’s own internal ecosystem, but also external dependencies for the digital guest experience, such as aggregate booking sites. Dynatrace’s synthetic monitoring capabilities play an important role in evaluating the performance of any third-party dependencies.
• Unparalleled visibility into airport kiosks: With Grail, Dynatrace’s data lakehouse technology, Spirit ingests and analyzes data from a variety of sources that include airport kiosk functionality.  Teams can also analyze aggregate interactions across all self-service kiosks, identifying hotspots or areas that need focus. They can then use this insight to inform the airport operator of how they can ease passenger flow in areas with heavy footfall, or notify them of hardware they need to replace, to optimize future customer journeys.
• Enhanced digital guest experiences: Dynatrace’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities give Spirit’s teams visibility into how guests navigate the airline’s digital applications. Spirit strives to be proactive in managing application performance and resolve issues before they impact end-users.

“At Spirit, we’re focused on investing in every facet of the guest experience, while at the same time keeping our fares affordable,” continued Varghese. “These investments span our entire our business, from having one of the youngest and most fuel-efficient fleets in the industry, to installing new cabin amenities like enhanced seats and high-speed Wi-Fi. This effort also extends to our state-of-the-art digital technology platforms. We’re thankful for a partner like Dynatrace for supporting our growth and efforts to provide excellent digital experiences for our guests.”

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A customer-centric business

Vivint is a smart home and automation company that prides itself on putting customer experience at the heart of its drive to help families to live safer, and better lives, driven by automation. Its technology is tightly integrated into the lives of millions of people, helping them to protect their homes and families. Any outage could result in risk to their safety leading to the potential loss of customers and brand reputation, so the technology must be flawless and work every time. With change as the only constant in a fast-paced world, Vivint needed to accelerate the speed of innovation across its business, to keep their competitive edge, by bringing new features to market faster, without compromising the customer experience.

To enable this, Vivint needed to enhance observability across its technology and software ecosystem, so they could have complete visibility, as innovations introduce new components. This would be crucial to enabling Vivint to understand how its customers were interacting with its products and what the experience was like for them, so its teams could identify where they needed to make improvements. Its monitoring solution was unable to provide the depth of visibility that teams needed, or the answers to understand the root cause of problems that were impacting the customer experience in a timely manner.

A smarter approach

Vivint needed a more automated, intelligent solution that could help them gain continuous insights so they can innovate faster and address any issues before they adversely impacted their customers. The new solution should be able to work across its hybrid environment – cloud platforms and legacy data centers and help quickly pinpoint root cause of issues so Vivint teams can resolve them fast. Following a detailed review of the observability market, it identified Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs.

“We looked at everything in the market and did POCs with about 20 different solutions. Dynatrace was the one platform that combined everything we were looking for,” said Mike Cabrera, Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Vivint. “One of the strengths of Dynatrace is it’s easy to use, so you can start immediately. It helped us instrument our applications and easily understand who was using them and why, and how they were interacting with them. That combination is incredibly powerful – there’s nothing else in the industry that compares.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Confident, faster innovation: Dynatrace’s full stack observability and advanced automation enabled Vivint to maintain its competitive differentiation by innovating at the speed of the market with greater confidence. Teams can see the impact of any changes they make in real time, with visibility from the code level right the way through to the end user. If problems arise, they can act quickly to protect customer experience.
• Smarter operations: The precise answers from Dynatrace have changed the way that Vivint’s teams work. Previously, its production operations teams spent 90% of their time firefighting issues. Now, they spend that time proactively optimizing its software to bring better products to market helping them stay ahead.
• Improved productivity: As a result of the reduced time spent reacting to problems, developers now have more time to focus on proactively improving services for its customers. This has enabled a 2x increase in the amount of innovation that Vivint’s engineering teams can deliver to the business and its customers each month.
• Greater customer happiness and satisfaction: The precise answers from Dynatrace have really lit up the customer experience for Vivint, helping its teams to build better products faster. The developer experience has also seen a significant benefit, as teams have better insights into how their code is functioning as they’re producing it. As a result, Vivint has not only seen developer productivity and satisfaction rise, but has also recorded a corresponding increase in customer satisfaction of around 15%.

“Dynatrace was a game changer for us,” continued Cabrera. “It bridged a gap between our technology and the people who use it. That helped us really understand our services and deliver a better experience to our users. That’s incredibly powerful, because we only care about our customers, so what we do all day is just trying to deliver a better experience and tighten our feedback loops. That’s where Dynatrace comes in. It enabled observability, but it also enabled us to look at what was happening deep in our infrastructure, which is something we didn’t have before.”

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Technology-enabled learning

Western Governors University (WGU) is a U.S.-based online university dedicated to making higher education as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible. Students come from all U.S. states and backgrounds and need a flexible learning style to fit around their busy work and home lives.

Students need a perfect experience every time they log in to a WGU system whether it’s to study, access a course, or take an assessment. Otherwise, they risk losing momentum in their studies, which can impact motivation and affect their grades. The performance and availability of WGU’s e-learning platforms are therefore key, especially during peak times ahead of an assessment. These platforms are built on a dynamic cloud-based architecture, to enable greater agility and rapid innovation that keeps WGU ahead of the curve.

Getting cloud-native observability

With a constantly changing technology stack, the WGU team found it challenging to get a 360-degree view of all its applications or understand the critical dependencies across its heterogenous environment. WGU understood that it needed end-to-end observability across its applications and infrastructure so it could identify and resolve the root-cause of issues as quickly as possible, to maintain seamless student experiences that extended beyond just online instruction. After evaluating the market, WGU selected Dynatrace, identifying its highly automated, intelligent system approach as a key differentiator.

“It’s extremely important that when a student logs onto our platform with a plan, we help them achieve their plan, no matter the time of the day or year,” said Oindrilla Sen, Software Engineering Manager at WGU. “When moving to a new observability and intelligence platform, we wanted to make sure we had the best in the market. We wanted a platform that not only integrates with our environment but gives intelligent advice on how we can make our systems more robust. We did due diligence, research, and checked customer feedback, and Dynatrace was an obvious choice.”

Life with Dynatrace

• A unified view of e-learning journeys: Dynatrace helps WGU to quickly understand the student experience across its end-to-end technology stack and identify potential breaking points before they impact learning journeys. This enables WGU’s engineering team to maintain performance and availability across its platforms, to ensure students can access their learning resources whenever and wherever they need to, with minimal or no disruptions.
• Better student experiences: With Dynatrace’s Smartscape technology, WGU has a continuously updated topology map that enables its teams to see upstream and downstream systems and understand all dependencies across the stack. This enables its teams to get a better insight into the cause and wider impact of specific issues that impact student’s learning journeys, so they can optimize their experiences more effectively.
• Greater responsiveness: When problems do occur, Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability capabilities instantly alert the engineering team to the issue. Previously, many faults remained undetected until students reported issues they had when accessing a particular system, but now engineers can proactively resolve issues as soon as they emerge.
• Minimized disruption: Dynatrace has already significantly reduced the time it takes WGU to resolve issues in its students’ learning journeys, by offering precise answers that reveal the root-cause in real time. This means that WGU’s engineering teams no longer need to spend time trying to understand what caused an issue, and can get straight onto resolving them, which minimizes disruption for students.

“WGU and Dynatrace are going to have an amazing future together,” continued Sen. “Dynatrace is the evolution every technology company should adopt. It’s intelligent, it’s agile, and it lives up to the promises it makes to its customers. When you have a problem with a system, it’s possibly not something you have seen before. So having an intelligent solution that adapts to the problem, and makes sure you are aware of it, is super important. We’re going to make sure we live up to our promises to our students, and we’re going to heavily use Dynatrace to make sure we don’t falter on that.”

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A focus on digital customer experience

loanDepot is one of the largest nonbank mortgage lenders in America, helping millions of customers to achieve their financial and homeownership goals.  Technology-driven transformation is at the heart of everything loanDepot does. This strategy has enabled the company to create a revolutionary digital-first approach that makes it easier, faster, and less stressful for customers to purchase or refinance a home.

A big part of loanDepot’s success is due to its customer-centric loans platform that enables the lender to digitally capture and validate applicant’s banking and asset documents and information. In many cases it removes the need for customers to speak to a loan officer, simplifying and speeding up the whole transaction. However, as loanDepot’s digital offerings grew, its infrastructure and operations became more complex. The company needed a way to move to a more scalable hybrid cloud technology stack, integrate core systems, and deliver new products faster, without affecting customer experience.

Maintaining a strong competitive advantage

loanDepot evaluated the market for an observability platform that could provide the insights needed to maintain its key differentiator by continually optimizing the customer experience. It identified Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs, based on its unified platform approach. After initial deployment, loanDepot quickly saw the advantage of extending Dynatrace into other areas of its business.

“Like most organizations, we had a myriad of performance assessment tools – some for infrastructure, some for applications, and some for availability,” said Michael Brown, Chief Information Security Officer, loanDepot. “Dynatrace was able to roll that all into one and it’s now native to everything we do at a customer experience level. We view Dynatrace as a single pane of glass that allows us to see our digital assets and understand the customer’s experience of interacting with them. Dynatrace has had such an impact that in the last two years, it’s been rolled out across most of the critical applications in our environment.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Differentiated customer experiences: With the ability to establish KPIs for customer journeys and intelligently process the implementation of its digital services, loanDepot can determine which features are slowing people down and automatically resolve those issues. Dynatrace also gives loanDepot’s teams insights into the business impact of critical customer touchpoints, for example, revealing whether optimizing a particular feature could affect conversion rates.
• More effective collaboration: Dynatrace’s unified platform approach has proven invaluable to supporting loanDepot’s ability to continue to serve the needs of its customers, by bringing its internal and external teams together on the same page. For example, Dynatrace provides the insights that enable operations teams to identify issues with third parties that need proactive intervention. This was vital when loanDepot launched its home equity line of credit (HELOC) business, which relied on integrations with seven different partners.
• Consolidation drives efficiency: Dynatrace enables loanDepot to bring together all essential observability data in a single platform. This eliminates the need for multiple solutions to monitor the performance of infrastructure, applications, and processes and provides the context needed to make more informed decisions. For example, Dynatrace enables developers to prioritize their efforts to optimize applications and resolve problems by forecasting the financial impact on the business.
• Getting cloud done right: With Dynatrace, loanDepot gets the precise answers it needs for a seamless move to the cloud. Real-time infrastructure monitoring ensures performance of critical applications, such as loanDepot’s core loan origination system, isn’t affected as services are migrated to its hybrid cloud platform. Because Dynatrace is cloud-agnostic, the infrastructure and operations team know they’ll get the same powerful insights regardless of the ecosystem they create.

“As we move our loan origination systems to the cloud and build our digital HELOC business, Dynatrace helps us extend the same level of observability we had on premises into our new environment,” added Brown. “Dynatrace enables us to look at not only systems availability, but the business metrics that drive conversions and profitability. It also helps us accelerate growth as our cloud footprint expands by showing when we’re not hitting the mark on our SLOs. We’re then able to drill into Dynatrace to investigate where we can optimize our processes to make the most of each customer we touch.”

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Building an application for sharing life’s important memories

Photobox prides itself on delivering exceptional customer experiences with its market-leading photo printing and gifting service. With no physical stores, the digital customer journey is crucial. The nature of Photobox’s business, however, means it faces the unique challenge of needing to sustain these journeys for hours or even weeks while its customers build their personalized photobooks and gifts via its website and app. These services are powered by a bespoke technology stack and home-grown e-commerce application, built on AWS EC2 and microservices, running on Kubernetes and AWS Lambda. In addition, Photobox operates multiple factories across Europe, which also rely on a custom technology stack.

Monitoring such a diverse technology stack became a significant challenge for Photobox. The company came to rely on ten different monitoring and logging solutions across its stack, and teams had to check each of them manually to understand the end-to-end customer journey. Overseeing so many disparate solutions had become humanly impossible to manage and costly to maintain, delivering little value. To understand an end-to-end flow, an engineer would have to look across five or six different dashboards and manually build out a journey for a particular set of challenges. That required about three or four hours of work to diagnose problems. Photobox wanted an all-in-one monitoring solution that could reduce that to just minutes by providing precise, actionable answers in one place, to help teams make faster, more data-driven decisions to optimize customer experiences.

Optimizing performance across a complex stack

Photobox sought an intelligent observability platform that could consolidate all monitoring data into a single pane of glass across the company’s end-to-end technology stack. After evaluating the market, Photobox identified Dynatrace as the clear choice, due to its flexibility, comprehensive capabilities, and its ability to quickly identify and solve performance issues. Dynatrace’s availability on AWS Marketplace was a further advantage, enabling Photobox to obtain Dynatrace through its Enterprise Agreement with AWS, which simplified the procurement process and optimized its spend with Amazon.

“In the monitoring space, everyone craves having one place they can look for clear, actionable data, and we just didn’t have that,” said Alex Hibbitt, Engineering Director, SRE & Fulfillment at albelli-Photobox Group. “With such a diverse technology stack, not many solutions were able to meet all our needs, but Dynatrace was the exception. Its flexibility and extensibility enables us to monitor our custom applications with minimal manual effort. Dynatrace’s automatic discovery and instrumentation for AWS Lambda and Kubernetes have also been invaluable, and fulfilled all of our most essential requirements.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Enhanced customer experience: Before Dynatrace, Photobox’s team would spend hours understanding a problem before they were able to resolve it. Now, with Dynatrace’s automation and AIOps capabilities, teams can identify the root cause instantly, so they can focus on resolution. This has enabled the team to reduce their mean time to resolution (MTTR) by up to 80%, helping deliver more seamless customer journeys.
• Improved peak events: For Photobox, the peak holiday shopping periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are crucial, bringing five to six times the level of usual traffic to its website. With Dynatrace, they are able to support this demand, by empowering its teams to proactively optimize the customer journey in a way that maximizes conversions and revenue. This capability has driven a reduction of 60% in the level of critical incidents that impact the availability of its services in comparison with previous peak periods.
• Drive confident decisions based on real-time insights: While Photobox could already access insights into customer behavior, the reports would often be out of date by the time they reached the teams that needed to act on them. Dynatrace provides real-time, actionable insights on how customers are interacting with Photobox’s services and how the performance of its applications impacts the sales funnel. These business insights help teams to maximize revenue, by making data-driven decisions on where to prioritize engineering effort to drive the greatest impact on sales.
• Resolve real user-impacting issues: Dynatrace’s Digital Experience Monitoring capabilities provide Photobox with invaluable insights into the relationship between what the user sees on the front-end and the performance of its back-end systems. This helps its engineering teams better understand user behaviour and error data, so they can resolve problems faster and more effectively. Dynatrace’s Session Replay capabilities also enable engineers to look more closely at specific bugs that are difficult to identify from the back-end, by seeing exactly what users see.

“Dynatrace has been revolutionary for Photobox, as our teams are now able to do work that previously would have taken hours in just minutes,” Hibbitt continued. “Since Dynatrace has been introduced, we’re able to identify the core pain points in any customer’s journey and focus our engineering effort on resolving those pain points. That’s allowed us to increase our customer experience massively, because Dynatrace is helping us to respond to things faster and in a more automated fashion. Dynatrace is the beating heart of our observability strategy. It supports the idea that observability is a mindset rather than a set of tools or practices, and for us, that’s key to making our customer journey as optimized as possible. In future, we’re looking to extend Dynatrace to more areas of our business, making it the core observability and automation platform for our estate.”

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Rapid expansion of omnichannel shopping

XXXLutz is Europe’s second largest furniture retailer, striving to deliver flawless omnichannel experiences so customers have flexibility of how and where they buy. To support this strategy, the retailer established its digital branch several years ago, which has grown quickly and become a significant revenue contributor alongside its brick-and-mortar stores. XXXLutz is also focused on rapid expansion through brand acquisition. However, with so many brands now under the XXXLutz banner, the company has built up a complex and distributed technology ecosystem supporting front-end and back-end processes, including omni-channel customer journeys.

The applications underpinning XXXLutz’s omnichannel customer experiences span multiple platforms and a multicloud and Kubernetes architecture. Such a complex stack, coupled with the retailer’s rapid growth, created silos across the organization, where different teams managed different applications and types of infrastructure with disparate tools. This fragmented approach made it difficult to get end-to-end visibility of customer journeys or understand how the systems supporting them were interconnected. Without this insight, it was challenging to identify the root-cause of issues in customer journeys, which impacted conversions and put XXXLutz’s revenue and customer loyalty at risk.

Eliminating manual burden

XXXLutz needed a solution that offered observability across the entire technology stack, from its legacy on-premises infrastructure to its cloud platforms and the microservices layer. It needed a platform that could automatically consolidate monitoring data into a single view to eliminate the need for teams to manually stitch together multiple datasets, so they could find the root cause of issues instantly. After evaluating the market, XXXLutz selected Dynatrace as the solution that could best meet its needs.

“The biggest value in Dynatrace is the confidence it gives us in our data,” comments Tobias Sammereyer, Team Lead Performance Engineering at XXXL Digital. “With Dynatrace, we are working based on facts, not assumptions. As a result, we’re spending less time searching for the cause of issues, and instead getting on with working together to solve them. That’s critical, as if their journey doesn’t work the first time, customers most likely won’t come back, so we need to be proactive in problem handling.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster transactions: With business event data from Grail, XXXLutz can get an overview of the problems that impact customers during the order process, such as detecting multi-use of expired voucher codes, problems with payment providers, or issues with product availability. For example, Grail uncovered that one step in the checkout process took more than 10 seconds to complete, but a simple code fix could bring that down to just 3 seconds, helping to improve conversions. ​
• Better collaboration: Dynatrace has broken down silos between internal departments as well as third-party software providers by providing a holistic source of data-driven truth. Having a single intelligent dashboard rather than multiple tools reduces complexity to drive faster, data-driven decision making and innovation.
• Enhanced customer experiences: Before Dynatrace, XXXLutz had limited visibility into its multicloud environment and lacked understanding of how its applications were interconnected. Now, with Dynatrace’s automation and AIOps capabilities, teams can instantly identify the root-cause of an issue, and proactively optimize services before customers are impacted. This has led to better conversions and higher customer loyalty.
• Data-driven decision making: Business insights from Grail enable XXXLutz’s digital teams to understand exactly which areas of the technology stack to optimize to drive better revenues and conversions. This enables the retailer to make more impactful decisions that meet the business’ priorities.

“Dynatrace keeps us well informed about the health of our services, so we can make better decisions for our business and our customers,” continued Tobias. “With Grail, we can instantly understand how what happens in our technology stack relates to business outcomes, such as revenue and conversions. As we continue to develop innovative new services, Dynatrace will be key for ensuring we are always proactively monitoring and optimizing those services to offer our customers the best possible shopping experiences.”

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Protecting sensitive customer data

USI Insurance provides tailored insurance services to customers across the US, delivered through cutting-edge home-grown and third-party solutions. One such solution is the USI ONE platform, which enables employees to use analytics, network resources, and strategic planning tools to create fully customized insurance offerings for customers. The USI ONE platform relies on sensitive customer data to ensure USI’s offerings are aligned to their unique needs, making application security imperative.

However, when scanning for vulnerabilities, teams relied on time-consuming manual processes. Since these scans were static and focused on pre-production, it was easy for newly discovered vulnerabilities to go undetected in production environments until the next scheduled scan. It was also difficult to spot vulnerabilities within some third-party applications, which remained a ‘black box’ for USI’s teams. In addition to these security challenges, USI also experienced application performance issues that were affecting end-users, and teams were losing valuable hours of productivity.

Taking a more intelligent approach

To maintain the security of its sensitive customer data and deliver better end-user experiences, USI needed an intelligent observability and security platform that could provide visibility across its complex environment. It needed to automatically identify and prioritize vulnerabilities and performance issues in production applications based on risk to the business, its employees, and customers. After evaluating the market, USI selected Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs.

“Dynatrace was the obvious choice for USI,” said Wendy Mathis, Software Lead Architect at USI. “It gives us the whole package, including user experience insights, which we’ve never had before. With Dynatrace’s comprehensive security features, we can see what’s going on with an application or a server in real time, so we can quickly narrow down and identify any issues that we might face. Dynatrace has become my best friend as a developer. I can identify the root-cause of issues and quickly work out which team I need to solve the problem.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster resolution through continuous discovery: With Dynatrace, USI can continuously monitor every tier of its application stack automatically. As a result, teams have the answers they need to resolve issues before they impact users and catch vulnerabilities before they’re exploited. In fact, Dynatrace has substantially reduced USI’s mean-time-to-resolution. Previously, it could take two to three days for teams to identify and resolve a problem or vulnerability. With Dynatrace, they’ve been able to reduce this to as little as 20 minutes.
• Improved operational alignment: As an all-in-one solution, Dynatrace is helping USI to lay the foundations for a longer-term shift towards a DevSecOps culture. With Dynatrace providing a single source of truth, teams can now collaborate more easily to release better software faster, and to detect and respond to flaws in production applications more efficiently.
• Deeper collaboration with vendors: The end-to-end observability from Dynatrace is enabling USI to collaborate better with the third-party solution providers it relies on, leading to faster resolution times when issues arise with their software. Dynatrace provides teams with visibility into third-party systems, so USI can identify performance issues in the external software and notify the vendor of the root cause.
• Better user experiences: With Dynatrace’s Digital Experience Monitoring capabilities, USI can drill down into user sessions to identify exactly how they are navigating a system and uncover issues that might be preventing them from completing a transaction. Teams can then leverage those insights to optimize the application, to enhance user productivity and drive better outcomes for customers.

“Dynatrace is the solution we never knew we needed but now we can’t live without,” says Mathis. “Cybersecurity is a constantly moving target and new vulnerabilities appear all the time. With Dynatrace, we can be proactive, as it lets us know when we need to make a change to keep our applications and data secure. We can catch issues and counter attacks before they impact end-users. Ultimately, Dynatrace helps us make sense of the craziness that happens in a development world and be more efficient in managing our environment.”

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Operating into the future of connectivity

Skyworks is a high-performance semiconductor manufacturer that provides the technology to enable connectivity for critical industries, from telecoms, to aerospace, and automotive. As demand for wireless connectivity continues to grow, Skyworks is always operating into the future to ensure it is ready to meet the needs of its customers and the world they connect as they constantly evolve. To enable this, it is increasing its investments in new and emerging technologies such as 5G and driving excellence in its manufacturing and engineering processes to enable faster speed to market through automation.

The applications and infrastructure that power these processes are built in a very complex, multicloud and hybrid technology environment. Skyworks has a footprint in every major cloud services platform, as well as its own on-premises data centers, which makes it difficult to obtain an end-to-end view across its applications. To maximize the impact of its investments in automation, Skyworks needed a modern observability solution that could reveal how its applications integrate with one another and provide precise answers about how they can be optimized and kept secure.

Bringing automation to the forefront

After an evaluation of the market, Skyworks selected Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability platform. After its initial need for full stack observability had been met, Skyworks continued to look at the other capabilities that Dynatrace could bring to its business through its additional modules, including Application Security.

“We derived a lot of intelligence from the monitoring insights we unlocked with Dynatrace, and that was a game changer,” said Satya Jayadev, Vice President and CIO, Skyworks Solutions Inc. “The beauty of Dynatrace was that we were able to integrate it seamlessly into our key business processes, including manufacturing. Within about a year, we quadrupled our investments in Dynatrace, which gave us a lot of insight into not just our IT processes, but also our manufacturing processes. We saw the value of Dynatrace Application Security when the Log4j vulnerability was discovered. It really gave us the edge in identifying those vulnerabilities and remediating them quickly.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Reduced risk exposure: Dynatrace Application Security enables Skyworks to identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities in its software quickly, with its automatic and precise risk impact assessment. These capabilities were invaluable when the Log4 vulnerability emerged and will continue to be critical to Skyworks’ ability to deliver fast, secure innovation in the future.
• Efficiency and consistency: The automatic and intelligent observability from Dynatrace has eliminated manual, siloed monitoring processes at Skyworks. As a result, it has been able to achieve more efficient, effective, and consistent operations globally, helping to accelerate its ongoing digital transformation and cloud migration.
• Self-healing applications: With the precise answers from Dynatrace, Skyworks is now looking to automate not only the detection, but the remediation of issues in its software as they begin to emerge. It plans to extend these capabilities even further by integrating the Application Security alerts from Dynatrace with its Jira and ServiceNow workspaces, so it can automatically resolve vulnerabilities as they are detected.

“With Dynatrace, we’ve identified that risk mitigation is value creation, and as we move into the future, that will really come to the fore in how we add value to our business,” continued Jayadev. “Dynatrace doesn’t just sell a product, it offers a solution to the problems we face. That’s what makes Dynatrace stand out in the market. It’s not just a vendor, Dynatrace is a true partner, and it’s always there for us when we need it.”

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Unrivalled flexible modern banking

BNZ’s market expansion strategy required it to reimagine the banking experience for its customers, while still providing a scalable and reliable service. To attract new and younger “digital native” customers, BNZ designed and launched YouMoney, its award-winning online banking capability. Designed as a completely customizable platform focused on user experience, the program extends an all-round financial management capability to its customers.  With YouMoney, a customer can seamlessly manage multiple accounts and their finances including mobile access, customized to suit their lifestyles. To support this modern digital banking approach, BNZ had to build the platform from the ground up based on a cloud-first strategy, where all new applications get deployed to the cloud first, and legacy applications are migrated away from on-premises environments.

Managing and monitoring the resulting increasingly complex hybrid infrastructure posed new challenges for BNZ. The bank needed to keep on top of any technical issues that could disrupt interactions. It also had to focus on optimizing user experiences, which meant frequent rollout changes, without risking downtime. To do this, BNZ needed end-to-end visibility into all customer transactions at a granular level, across each touchpoint, and the ability to quickly identify the precise root cause of any issues, so it could anticipate issues and fix them to deliver seamless digital banking experiences.

Granular insights, continuous innovation

Knowing that the digital-native customer base can be very demanding and selective, BNZ wanted a continuous mechanism to understand how customers were using its applications so it could better target its innovation efforts, ensure fast delivery of capabilities, and uphold its reputation as a digital leader in the banking space. This meant it had to accelerate its cloud migration efforts. Dynatrace was the clear choice because of the automatic, intelligent observability it provides into both on-premises and cloud environments, and its ability to join the dots across the complex technology stack and individual touchpoints in interactions to pinpoint the exact root cause of issues.  With such granular insights, BNZ’s teams can foresee issues and fix them before they adversely impact the customer.

“Migrating our core banking platform to the cloud was akin to performing open heart surgery whilst you’re doing a sprint. The observability and telemetry Dynatrace provided was critical to making that project a success,” commented Nic Olivier, Head of Platforms, Bank of New Zealand. “Radical changes are happening to BNZ’s underlying technology stack. Moving from a single data center to running across multiple data centers, from monolithic to distributed applications. Dynatrace helps us ensure we are providing a world class customer experience, while also delivering innovation faster than ever.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Superior customer interactions, every time: Dynatrace provides unparalleled visibility into 85 BNZ applications across more than 2,500 services, giving DevOps teams the ability to join the dots between user experience and backend code, wherever it may reside. This has contributed to a 94% reduction in major incidents over the past five years resulting in superior customer experience.
• Less disruption, higher satisfaction: Dynatrace’s end-to-end automatic observability and AIOps capabilities identify the root-cause of issues instantly, so BNZ’s teams can get ahead and correct them fast. For example, Dynatrace was able to show that a considerable slowdown in customer transactions could be solved by rebuilding a faulty platform and migrating the application to a new set of databases to work around the problem without disrupting users.
• Timely innovation: With fewer issues to resolve, BNZ’s DevOps teams have more time to work on optimizing customer experiences and rolling out new services and functionality. Over the past five years, the bank has seen a 58% increase in speed of innovation, helping solidify its place as a digital market leader.
• Increased operational efficiencies: Dynatrace works seamlessly alongside other key solutions in BNZ’s toolchain, such as ServiceNow. This drives automated end-to-end DevOps workflows and further efficiencies that help the bank to optimize user experiences, increase the speed, and enhance the quality of changes it deploys to its production applications for colleagues and customers.

“The BNZ tagline is ‘If you can imagine a better future, let’s find a way.’ I think the tagline perfectly sums up the relationship between BNZ and Dynatrace,” continued Olivier. “By instrumenting our core banking platforms, we’re absolutely finding a better way for our customers – providing them with the ultimate digital banking experience. We are innovating faster than ever before, and with fewer issues.”

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BT is undergoing a major company-wide digital transformation, with the goal of delivering excellent customer experiences and creating innovative products and services. To drive this transformation, BT’s Digital unit is migrating the Group’s critical applications to a modern multicloud technology stack built on AWS and Google Cloud, and creating a unified service management capability, with ServiceNow at the core.However, the move to a cloud-native architecture introduced complexity across BT’s IT services environment. The BT Digital team relied on 16 disparate monitoring tools to maintain visibility into the end-to-end technology stack. This made it difficult to identify the root cause of performance issues quickly, so they could be resolved before customer journeys were affected. As a result, it was challenging to deliver the customer experience excellence that BT was striving for.

A three-phase transformation

BT Digital realized it needed to revolutionize service operations across the Group to achieve its goals. Its teams required a consolidated view across the end-to-end technology environment, with real-time visibility into the user journey to enable proactive and predictive service optimization. After evaluating the market, BT identified Dynatrace as the best fit, due to its ability to automate issue detection and consolidate all application monitoring capabilities onto a single platform.

“We identified three key phases for our transformation at BT,” comments Alex Bell, Chief Architect for BT Enterprise. “First, we needed to transform digital operations to modernize our processes and services, driven by the move to the cloud. Second, we wanted to embrace AIOps to automate issue detection and analysis, so we could overcome the complexity of a modern operating environment. We saw the unique combination of Dynatrace and ServiceNow as invaluable in providing that capability, through more intelligent, simplified, and automated service operations. Finally, our vision is to work towards a third phase of achieving self-healing systems by 2025, using Dynatrace and ServiceNow to automate the resolution of issues, as well as finding the root cause.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Unified observability – Dynatrace provides a single source of truth across BT’s end-to-end technology stack. This is enabling BT Digital to replace 16 legacy monitoring tools with one unified platform, supporting its drive towards cumulative cost savings of £28m by 2027
• Real-time answers – Dynatrace’s automated issue detection capabilities enable anomalies to be identified in real time, and its AI engine provides precise answers that reveal the root cause instantly. This has helped to reduce MTTI (mean time to investigate) by up to 90%, meaning problems can be intercepted and resolved before the customer is impacted.
• More successful launches – Dynatrace’s AIOps capabilities provide a deeper understanding of the performance of BT’s digital services, so its teams can see where they can be proactively optimized to enhance customer journeys. The latest iPhone launch demonstrated the full impact of these benefits, as BT enjoyed its most stable major product release ever.
• Enhanced productivity – The automation enabled by Dynatrace is helping BT Digital to double the productivity of its teams, by allowing them to focus on tasks where they can deliver the greatest value to the Group and its customers. This will become even more pronounced as it begins the third phase of its digital transformation, with the move towards a zero ops model, underpinned by self-healing capabilities.

“Dynatrace was light years ahead of any other solution in its space,” continued Bell. “It provided instant value through its ability to identify issues in real time, instead of 30 minutes after the fact. With Dynatrace, we can understand the experience our customers are getting from us during the moment of their interaction. We can then spot any anomalies and detect way back in the underlying infrastructure or code layer what the root cause of those problems might be. That gives us the ability to intercept and resolve issues before customers start to see any impact on their experience. All of these benefits enable our teams to concentrate on the core objective of our digital transformation; creating industry-leading customer journeys.”

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Accelerating innovation without compromise

Soldo, Europe’s leading spend management platform, offers organizations a simple, automated way to delegate, control, and track expenses for employees and departments, and helps finance teams manage budgets with real-time visibility over company-wide spending. To accomplish this Soldo requires maximum uptime and performance of its software so customers can access it from anywhere and at any time.

Its platform is built on a complex cloud-native technology stack, running in AWS and leveraging a Kubernetes-based architecture. Soldo also uses open-source code and adheres to agile and secure delivery practices to drive continuous innovation and align with strict financial services industry regulations.

Given the speed at which its dynamic cloud environment changes, and the prevalence of open-source code in its applications, Soldo needed to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities in its production environment, to keep its customers’ data and transactions secure. Achieving this was previously a challenge, as the company’s software testing practices and tools were mainly focused on pre-production. Each time its development and security teams discovered new zero-day vulnerabilities, such as Log4Shell, they had to search for them manually.

Extending to new use cases

Soldo was already using Dynatrace to optimize the performance of its digital services and deliver seamless user experiences. After evaluating the runtime security solutions on the market, it identified that extending its use of Dynatrace by activating its Application Security Module would provide the best solution for its requirements, due to the efficiency of its unified platform approach. With Dynatrace Application Security, Soldo’s teams can continuously and automatically identify and prioritize software vulnerabilities across the entire software delivery lifecycle, including at runtime, to deliver more secure digital interactions.

“Soldo exists to help business owners focus on growing their organization without wasting time managing expenses and corporate spending,” said Luca Domenella, Head of Cloud Operations and DevOps at Soldo. “This requires us to earn our customers’ trust that we can offer the highest level of protection for the troves of sensitive data they entrust with us. Dynatrace gives us an uncompromising level of control over the security of our software, by continuously monitoring for application vulnerabilities in our production environments. That means we instantly know how a new vulnerability affects our digital services, so we can respond quickly to keep our customers’ data safe.”

Life with Dynatrace

• A full DevSecOps lifecycle: With Dynatrace Application Security, Soldo has continuous, automatic runtime vulnerability analysis and protection in real time, giving its teams the confidence that they can keep their applications vulnerability-free in production environments.
• More effective prioritization: When a new open-source library vulnerability is disclosed to the community, Dynatrace provides Soldo with a real-time, automatically prioritized view of all potentially impacted applications and data in its ecosystem. This enables its teams to easily see where the vulnerability exists, understand its risk impact and severity in the context of their environment, and tier their remediation efforts accordingly.
• Faster vulnerability resolution: Davis, the AI engine at the core of the Dynatrace platform, initiates remediation workflows to resolve vulnerabilities automatically, enabling Soldo’s teams to reduce the time it takes to respond to new zero-day vulnerabilities from days to minutes.
• Maintaining a more strategic focus: With Dynatrace identifying, prioritizing, and helping to remediate the vulnerabilities that matter automatically and in real-time, Soldo’s teams spend less time manually sifting through alert noise and triaging new threats when they emerge. As a result, they are free to focus on more strategic work, and identify new ways to improve their DevSecOps lifecycle.

“The precise answers we get from Dynatrace are invaluable and save our teams from wasting countless hours trawling through security alerts to understand our risk,” continued Domenella. “For example, when Log4Shell emerged last year, Dynatrace instantly showed us exactly where and how the vulnerability affected our platform. Those insights enabled our teams to remediate the vulnerability in just a few minutes, rather than the days or weeks it would otherwise have taken. Ultimately, Dynatrace helps ensure that nothing escapes our DevSecOps lifecycle, so we can focus on more strategic work than finding, triaging, and remediating vulnerabilities.”

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Faster understanding

As a unitary authority, the council is responsible for everything from street lighting and bin collections to social housing, education, and social work services.Like most government organisations, the council relies on a variety of third-party platforms to manage its wide range of services and business functions. Legacy systems are being replaced over time as Fife continues to invest in digital solutions to modernize public services and customer transactions.

Large scale project implementations and systems deployed to thousands of network users can often be hampered by error messages and performance issues. Without effective root cause analysis, sometimes neither the council team nor its service providers can identify the source of the issues to resolve them. Fife turned to Dynatrace for an intelligent observability solution to overcome these issues and accelerate service improvements.

Scott McKenzie, technical specialist, Fife Council explains: “We work in close partnership with all our third-party providers. But when you’re dealing with huge applications linked to lots of other networked systems, and thousands of end-users on a range of devices, it can be really hard to pinpoint the cause of any problems.

Better employee experiences

With Dynatrace, Fife has been able to improve the performance of both desktop case management solutions and mobile applications used by workers in the field.

In some cases, users had complained of performance issues that many employees assumed were to do with poor network performance or mobile signal. Without intelligent observability, it had proven difficult for the council and its service providers to find fixes. McKenzie said: “One issue had been rumbling on for weeks, but we found it instantly with Dynatrace and were able to get it resolved.”

More efficient operations

Dynatrace’s advanced AIOps capabilities have also enabled Fife Council to operate more efficiently. The Dynatrace platform is managed by just one staff member, where the previous approach required up to ten people, who can now refocus their efforts on more value-driving work. McKenzie adds: “Instead of throwing internal resources at a problem for weeks and getting to the root cause eventually, Dynatrace’s AI can point us to the answer instantly. It’s our hope that as Dynatrace becomes more central to the way we operate, we can be more proactive in how we manage user experiences.”

Fife Council’s ultimate goal is for any new tier one application that comes online to be automatically instrumented with Dynatrace for observability. The council also aims to integrate Dynatrace with its IT service management platform, so relevant teams can be automatically alerted to issues, as well as root causes, so they can be resolved before users are impacted.

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Keeping the wheels of commerce moving

Dubai Customs continues to transform its services to provide smart platforms that help drive a thriving online business in the UAE. Key to this is Mirsal, a collection of mission-critical applications used to process the movement of goods in and out of the emirate. Any failure in these applications can lead to long delays and tailbacks at the border, potentially causing commodities with a limited shelf-life to spoil. Maximizing uptime is therefore vital to ensure clearance processes are fast and meet the high standards its customers expect. Dubai Customs also aspires to being able to contact customers proactively to help them complete transactions if they encounter a problem.

To manage the performance and availability of its digital services, Dubai Customs previously relied on a variety of legacy monitoring solutions. Many of these solutions were native to its infrastructure, which spans traditional data center and private cloud environments. Development teams also used their own preferred testing tools to ensure any new builds met the required standards before being released to production. This fragmented approach resulted in delays to innovation and performance blind spots, which meant Dubai Customs was often unaware of problems until customers reported them.

Automatic discovery and precise answers

Dubai Customs needed end-to-end, real-time observability across its applications and infrastructure to improve the reliability of its services and help teams resolve issues before they impacted customers. After evaluating the market, Dubai Customs identified Dynatrace as the best solution for its needs. It saw particular benefits in Dynatrace’s ability to automatically capture every user transaction, rather than relying on random sampling to baseline performance. This offered Dubai Customs visibility into every user journey and precise, AI-powered answers into the impact of any performance problems on their experience. These insights would enable its teams to instantly identify the precise root cause of problems and prioritize their efforts to resolve those with the most significant impact on its customers.

“Dynatrace was the obvious choice due to its comprehensive range of capabilities and the depth and breadth of observability it provided at infrastructure level in a single solution,” says Mushtaq Khan, Infrastructure Team Lead at Dubai Customs. “Dynatrace gave us an end-to-end view across our hyper converged infrastructure environment within seconds, without needing multiple agents or plugins. Its fully automated continuous discovery eliminated blind spots and meant we no longer had to rely on sampling or estimate the impact application performance has on our user experience.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Streamlined performance testing – Previously, teams had to run different tests to evaluate the performance of each layer of the technology stack, which was complex and time-consuming to manage. With Dynatrace’s full stack monitoring capabilities, teams can run all tests with a single solution when promoting new code to production. This has reduced the number of tests its teams need to conduct for each new release from approximately 30, to just three.
• Faster and higher quality releases – Dynatrace has dramatically accelerated Dubai Customs’ time-to-market for new digital services and application updates, speeding up its release cycle by approximately 70%. Its development teams have been able to ‘shift-left’ by using Dynatrace to identify and eliminate bugs in pre-production, resulting in higher quality releases.
• Enhanced customer service – Dynatrace’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) module enables Dubai Customs to be more proactive in ensuring a smooth customer experience. Previously, if a customer experienced a problem, the system would generate a tracking number for them to report to customer services. With Dynatrace, Dubai Customs can capture that number on the backend, identify the user, and create a dashboard to provide its customer service team with all the insights they need to understand the problem. In the future, its goal is to enable service teams to use these insights to proactively reach out to customers and resolve issues for them faster.
• Customized observability – Dubai Customs is using the open and extensible nature of Dynatrace to capture custom metrics. This enables it to put more data about the outcomes that matter most to its business into actionable context. Previously, its teams only had access to insights for the previous day, which quickly become redundant in a fast-moving organization. Dynatrace gives teams real time, actionable data and more precise answers that enable them to make more effective decisions.

“Dynatrace has completely transformed the way we operate as an organization,” said Imran Jamadar, Technical Champion at Dubai Customs. “The precise answers from Dynatrace enable us to maintain a fast clearance process and meet the strict SLAs we use to ensure we meet our customers’ expectations. We can now identify and resolve issues immediately and no longer have to wait for customers to tell us if there’s a problem. Since adopting Dynatrace, we have scored 91.8 percent on the Customer Happiness Index and become one of the top three entities in all Dubai Government departments. We are always striving to uphold our standards and raise the bar, and Dynatrace is essential in helping us achieve that goal.”

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Going cloud-native to build a modern platform

Saxo Bank wanted to offer a market-leading trading platform that best supports the needs of individual investors as well as white-label partners, such as banks and management firms. Its platform connects to global stock markets in London, New York, and Tokyo, handling more than 800,000 different prices per second. Availability and reliability are critical to the success of the platform, due to the fast paced nature of the investment and trading market.

To enable the high speed, low latency its platform needed, Saxo Bank built a fully on-premises IT stack, running on Multicast and Windows technology. More recently, to drive greater digital agility, it began to migrate towards a microservices and containerized architecture on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Stack (AKS), in an on-premises private cloud. This brought significant complexity to its environment. To overcome this, the bank needed a single solution that could monitor across all technologies, reduce alert storms, and cut resolution times.

Turning data into answers for better incident management

Saxo Bank turned to Dynatrace for end-to-end, intelligent observability across its entire environment. Dynatrace’s all-in-one solution streamlines incident management, by providing instant and precise answers when problems arise. This would prevent the bank’s teams from feeling overwhelmed by the storms of up to 1.5 million alerts they receive from legacy monitoring solutions every month. Dynatrace also offered Saxo Bank an outside-in view, so teams could identify if and how an issue affected users, helping them determine the significance of an issue and be more proactive in its customer support, particularly for its VIP clients.

“The availability of our platform is crucial, because it only takes a few seconds of downtime to create a huge risk for us and our customers,” said Thomas Ulrich, Global Head of Infrastructure & Workplace Technology at Saxo Bank. “To manage that risk, we collect large volumes of data on the performance of our platform, but it previously lacked context. As a result, we struggled to make sense of it quickly enough to act and prevent issues impacting our platform. Dynatrace was the obvious solution, as its AI capabilities turn data into answers that point us at where to look, and what to look for.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster investment and trading innovation – Insights from Dynatrace enable Saxo Bank to catch any performance degradation earlier in the production lifecycle, helping its platform developers deploy faster and more successfully. Dynatrace’s AI capabilities also allow teams to identify root cause of any problems immediately, resulting in shorter resolution times.
• Reduced alert noise – Dynatrace consolidates notifications, suppressing alert noise and enabling teams to identify the answers they need to resolve problems quickly. Teams no longer need to manage multiple monitoring tools and waste time troubleshooting issues and triaging, freeing them up to focus on more productive tasks and innovation.
• Streamlined incident management – Saxo Bank has integrated Dynatrace with ServiceNow to support incident management processes. Dynatrace senses any deviations from the norm in the performance of Saxo Bank’s platform, links symptoms and root cause into a single notification, then pipes it into a ServiceNow ticket for a relevant team to pick up and action. By ensuring the right teams have access to all key information about an issue, including business impact, Saxo Bank has boosted its efficiency and reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 50%.
• Improved customer support – Dynatrace equips Saxo Bank’s customer service teams with precise answers about any issues its platform is experiencing in real-time, enabling them to better support clients. Previously, if a client contacted customer support with a problem, the team would need to bring in a developer and the issue might have taken several days to resolve. Now, teams can access all information through Dynatrace and resolve issues in hours or even minutes.

“Dynatrace is transforming the way we work and guarantees the performance and availability of our platform,” says Ulrich. “We’ve been able to eliminate manual processes and time-consuming triage efforts, freeing up more time for our developers to focus on innovation and enhancing our platform. We’re also able to be much more proactive. Dynatrace automatically spots issues at a very early stage, so we can predict and prevent problems from impacting our platform and clients. We have improved our IT operation notably by introducing Dynatrace.”

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Delivering better banking experiences

Riyad Bank embarked on a major business transformation, with the aim of enhancing the digital banking experience for its customers. To support this drive, the organization built a private cloud environment using Red Hat OpenShift. This created the agility Riyad Bank needed, whilst complying with stringent local banking legislation that prohibits the use of public cloud services. Now, it is working to enhance its cloud infrastructure, transform applications, and modernize legacy technology to create a modern, open banking platform.

As part of this, Riyad Bank is migrating applications to a microservices and container-based architecture, to maximize the value of its private cloud environment. As a result, the bank will be able to innovate faster, create new digital banking solutions, and build a stronger competitive advantage in the market. However, the transition to a cloud-native environment has also introduced significant new complexity, which makes it more difficult to deliver seamless digital banking experiences.

Demystifying the complexity of the cloud

Riyad Bank needed to maintain end-to-end observability into its applications, so its teams could identify the root cause of problems and resolve them quickly, to provide the best possible experiences for its customers. It therefore needed a single monitoring solution that was compatible with both its private cloud infrastructure, as well as the range of other technologies within its environment. After evaluating the potential options, Riyad Bank identified Dynatrace as the best solution for its requirements.

“We wanted more detail about the performance of the apps in our private cloud so we could create better services and experiences for our customers,” says Jamil Barakat, Executive Vice President, Business Technology Service Operations at Riyad Bank.  “Dynatrace was the best fit as a single solution that could provide end-to-end observability across our diverse technology stack. Other monitoring solutions were not as compatible with our private cloud and didn’t offer the same level of insight into the performance of microservices and containers, so it was an easy decision to implement Dynatrace.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Better banking experiences – Dynatrace’s AI capabilities instantly notify the relevant teams at Riyad Bank if there is a problem with one of its services, so they can investigate and resolve it before customers are impacted. The bank uses Dynatrace’s synthetic monitoring capabilities to identify the root cause of any issues relating to external parties, such as local internet providers and content delivery networks. These insights significantly reduce the time teams need to spend troubleshooting, so they can prioritize tasks that improve service delivery for customers.
• A single source of truth – With Dynatrace, Riyad Bank has a single observability solution across its entire environment, providing all the insights it needs from one dashboard. The bank’s testing team, applications team, and infrastructure team all share this same single source of truth, improving collaboration and enabling them to deliver greater business value.
• More confident launches – Dynatrace helps Riyad Bank to ensure new digital banking services work as well as expected when they go live in production, as it can monitor their performance in testing environments before the new version of an application is deployed. The bank can also conduct stress testing to ensure applications will continue to perform under different patterns of traffic and identify where optimization may be required to maintain seamless experiences.
• Precise insight to drive better services – Riyad Bank plans to extend its use of Dynatrace’s digital experience management capabilities to real user monitoring (RUM) in the future. This will help business teams understand how customers interact with the bank’s applications and how functionality could be improved to create a better customer experience.

“Dynatrace has become an essential solution at Riyad Bank, due to the mission-critical nature of the applications and services running on our private cloud platform,” Barakat says. “Dynatrace simplifies the complexity of our cloud-native environment, so we can monitor and understand the performance of our services from end to end. In a single view, we can see the status of all of our applications and services – which enables us to focus on what matters most to our business, giving us a significant advantage.”

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Scaling to meet record travel demand

As the world recovered from the pandemic, demand for international travel surged to record levels. In anticipation of this, Meliá needed to ensure its booking services could scale rapidly, to maintain and optimize user-experience during sudden peaks, when travel restrictions lifted. It also needed to allow its guests to access more hotel services via the mobile and web platforms where they prefer to interact.

To enable this, Meliá accelerated its digital transformation, by migrating its critical applications to a cloud-native environment, running on Kubernetes in AWS. This provided the scalability and agility Meliá needed to meet soaring demand for bookings and release better digital functionality faster. However, the dynamic nature of its new cloud-native architecture made it difficult to maintain the observability needed to optimize its services with traditional monitoring approaches. Meliá needed a modern solution to ensure it could maximize revenue and deliver frictionless guest experiences.

Meeting the needs of modern travellers

Meliá identified Dynatrace® as the best solution for its requirements, due to the platform’s ability to provide automatic and intelligent observability in complex Kubernetes environments. Dynatrace’s broad and deep observability and advanced AIOps capabilities would allow Meliá to ensure its digital services deliver the same quality experience as in-person interactions with hotel staff. It would also provide the precise answers Meliá’s teams needed to reduce time spent resolving problems, so they could focus on digital innovation.

“Maintaining frictionless relationships between staff and guests, while also reducing in-person contact, has been a critical goal for our teams as part of the Stay Safe with Meliá program,” said Christian Palomino, Vice President of Global IT, Meliá Hotels International. “To achieve this, we have accelerated delivery of new digital services that enable our guests to do things like check-in or book a table in our restaurants via our mobile app, reducing the need for person-to-person contact, and Dynatrace has been critical to this effort. Dynatrace gives us the precise, AI-powered insights we need to understand exactly how our customers interact with our applications, and how their experiences impact our business.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster digital innovation: With Dynatrace, Meliá’s teams are rededicating their focus to finding new ways to accommodate the rapidly evolving preferences of the modern traveller. This helped the hotel chain reduce the reliance on in-person interactions,  leading to an increase in the volume of transactions handled through its digital channels from around 40% at the end of 2019, to more than 80% during the pandemic, which was a major asset through those difficult times.
• Unparalleled insight into the guest experience: The precise answers from Dynatrace help Meliá discover where guests are struggling during their interactions with the hotel’s digital services. This enables its teams to identify what they need to do to optimize the user experience and ensure guests can fully relax during their stay.
• Improved operational efficiency: Meliá’s teams previously wasted time manually triaging and troubleshooting issues, searching through monitoring data to discover the source of any problems with its digital services. Now, Dynatrace points to the precise root cause instantly, so Meliá’s teams can jump straight into resolving issues before guest experiences are impacted. In addition, this gives them time back to focus on driving innovation and constantly improving digital services.
• Better customer care: In the rare event that hotel guests do experience problems with Meliá’s digital services, Dynatrace’s intuitive interface means teams across the wider business also have access to its insights. This gives Meliá’s support teams the precise answers they need to provide faster, more personalized resolutions, and ultimately deliver a greater standard of care.

“The cloud and Dynatrace have transformed the way our business operates and how our teams work in this modern era,” continued Palomino. “Before Dynatrace, we used to spend hours manually searching through metrics, logs, and traces to piece together insights about user experience. Now, this takes minutes or seconds. This has enabled our teams to focus more time on driving business and customer value, and to ensure our ongoing success during what has been a challenging time in our industry.”

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Driving innovation and optimizing customer experience

TSB Bank, part of the Spanish banking group, Sabadell, is the UK’s seventh largest retail bank, offering a full range of services to over five million customers. In its effort to further expand digital services to its customers, the bank has built a modern banking platform on AWS, IBM Cloud, and BT Cloud. The platform supports customers across all key channels, including mobile, where 90% of servicing transactions are completed and over 70% of sales are done.

TSB wanted to accelerate its digital innovation to ensure it could better meet customers where they increasingly prefer to transact. However, its transition to a dynamic multicloud architecture to support this digital transformation introduced rising complexity across its IT environment.

Multicloud strategies lead to rising complexity

To proactively manage customer expectations and ensure it can provide best-in-class banking experiences, TSB needed a new approach to monitoring. Its teams needed an all-in-one solution that could provide full-stack observability into its multicloud environment, offering a single source of truth around customer experience. After evaluating the market, TSB identified Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs, as it offers real-time, AI-powered answers about the user experience. The automatic and intelligent observability delivered by Dynatrace would also enable TSB to accelerate its digital transformation and provide the full-stack context its IT teams needed to continuously optimize the customer experience.

“Accelerating our digital transformation is top priority for us, and Dynatrace is the killer app to help us achieve this,” said Suresh Viswanathan, Chief Operating Officer at TSB Bank. “To keep pace with our customers’ needs and how the market is evolving, we must ensure our digital services are best-in-class, always accessible, and easy to use. Dynatrace’s extensive observability and AIOps capabilities have been critical to our success. Before Dynatrace, too much of our teams’ time was consumed by manual-intensive tasks and reactive problem chasing. Now, these tasks are managed automatically, and our teams are free to focus on what matters most – driving innovation for our customers and accelerating our digital transformation strategy.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Auto-discovery and instrumentation – Dynatrace’s AI-powered approach enables TSB to automatically discover all the components and dependencies across its entire cloud stack, end-to-end, and continuously instrument the environment to detect any changes. This gives TSB automatic and intelligent observability across its complex infrastructure, helping to maintain real-time insight into the customer experience.
• AI-assistance makes sense of complexity – With Dynatrace, TSB gets precise answers about where its teams can make changes to optimize customer journeys through explainable, causation-based AI. This helps to cut through alert noise and enables the bank’s teams to focus on work that has the biggest impact on customers and the business, particularly continued innovation.
• Delivery of new digital services increases – By providing unparalleled observability into its complex multicloud environment, and with AI assistance enabling time savings that have being redirected to innovation, Dynatrace is helping TSB to accelerate digital transformation and focus on building world-class banking services.
• Better collaboration between teams – With Dynatrace, TSB has a single source of truth. As a result, teams don’t waste time in war rooms, working out what needs to be prioritized or discussing the best way to get something done. Getting this time back allows them to focus on accelerating transformation and driving better outcomes for the bank and its customers.

“Dynatrace helps us to understand areas in the digital journey where improvements will deliver the greatest outcomes for our business and our customers,” Viswanathan continues. “The platform has saved our teams from having to manually search for these insights, so they can instead focus on improving our digital connection with our customers.”

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Digital transformation leads to complexity

Wiley has been a leader in research and education for more than 200 years. Today, Wiley helps researchers, learners, institutions and corporations achieve their goals with tech-enabled content, platforms, and services. As the global research system evolves, institutions shift toward online education and digital curriculum, and the jobs market rapidly changes, there is increased demand for Wiley’s extensive digital research and educational resources. These include online platforms that get peer-reviewed research to market faster and make science more broadly available; adaptive courseware, high-impact curriculum, and outcomes-oriented online education; and professional learning content and platforms, job training and placement services, and databases and career centers to help employers and employees succeed. To keep pace with customer needs, the company migrated to a cloud-native architecture, including Kubernetes and serverless compute services.

As a result, Wiley’s technology stack, comprising hundreds of applications and multiple cloud platforms, became increasingly complex to monitor and manage. Its technology teams identified the need for a more advanced solution to help increase their efficiency, improve customer insights, and more rapidly identify and resolve issues, ultimately freeing more time for driving innovation.

Deep observability and causal AIOps simplifies cloud complexity

After evaluating the market, Wiley identified that Dynatrace was the best solution to serve its needs, offering a unified platform with deep observability and advanced AIOps capabilities. With Dynatrace, Wiley’s technology teams benefit from the ability to automatically and continuously discover their entire technology stack and process the billions of dependencies across its multiple cloud environments, in real time.

“Providing access to our research and education content, platforms and services from anywhere, at any time, is vital, and Dynatrace is key to our ability to achieve this,” said Sean Mack, CIO and CISO, Wiley. “We’ve transformed from using technology as an enabler, to having technology at the core of everything we do. But it’s difficult to balance digital transformation with the need to continue delivering the best services and experiences. Dynatrace allows us to simplify our dynamic cloud environment, providing the insights we need to ensure reliable, 24/7 access to our educational resources and services.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Deep observability: Wiley now has a single AI-powered platform that can automatically and continuously discover its entire technology stack and process the billions of dependencies across its multiple cloud environments, applications, and services, in real time. This makes it easier for Wiley to keep track of its increasingly dynamic cloud-native environment, while reducing manual effort across its teams.
• Better business value: Wiley’s technology teams have been able to more proactively identify and resolve issues, freeing more time for the team to focus on advancing Wiley’s digital transformation and accelerating innovation.
• Seamless user experiences: Dynatrace’s advanced AIOps capabilities provide precise answers to any issues that arise across Wiley’s digital service delivery chain. This has made it easier for teams to limit negative impacts to customers and deliver uninterrupted access to Wiley’s expansive digital research and education resources.
• Greater collaboration: By consolidating observability data into a single platform, Dynatrace has eliminated silos, enabling greater collaboration between Wiley’s teams as they work to create better research and education services for its customers.

“Dynatrace has changed the way we approach the customer experience by enabling our teams to more proactively resolve issues, limiting impacts to the researchers, learners, institutions, and corporations we serve,” continued Mack. “Before Dynatrace, keeping up with our increasingly complex infrastructure was draining our teams’ time. Now, we can automatically capture every source of observability and user-experience data in a single place. This shift alone has freed our teams to invest more time in proactively acting on the insights they’re getting in real time, so they can create better, more innovative services and experiences while also maintaining focus on our primary goal – meeting our customers where they are, whenever they need our resources.”

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