Close Encounters with Out of This World Digital Experience
By Aaron Rudger

As technologists, we find ourselves in the middle of tumultuous times and radical change: cloud, containers, automation, artificial intelligence, mobility, the Internet of Things, cyberwarfare, digital transformation, and more! When the $&#! hits the fan, military strategists reference a mental framework called the OODA loop, to sort chaos into clarity. At Perform 2017, we were reminded of how customers continue to find clarity amidst today’s complexity by focusing on their customers. This year’s Digital Experience track at Perform reminded us all of how to successfully orient performance management around the customer.

Adobe’s Operations Monitoring Transformation Story

Think you’ve got a lot of change to deal with? Try transforming an entire multi-BILLION dollar business from selling license software in boxes to digital subscriptions — in ONE YEAR! When Adobe changed their business, the eCommerce team had to radically change their entire platform, and their monitoring strategy. With the help of Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring, Greg Thomsen, Event Management Analyst at Adobe pivoted to a customer-first approach.

With eyes on the customer experience, they quickly raised the bar for improving it. Adobe realized that responding to issues—literally getting the teams together and orchestrating action—was now a bottleneck. So they automated that entire process.

As deeper visibility grew with Dynatrace AppMon, performance became more critical. A key factor for driving their APM journey was the development of clear dashboards and reports. This helped the business understand and appreciate the role performance plays in achieving their digital objectives.

Let’s Retire Response Time!

Whether you are a high-end crystal manufacturer, or a regional bank, digital experience means everything when it comes to competing for increasingly sophisticated and mobile-oriented customers. Both Swarovski and KBC Bank focus relentlessly on their online customers, across web and mobile channels.

Thomas Rotte, Chief Performance Officer at KBC shared how performance analytics can actually be a gift to development and operations teams. When not managed as a priority feature, performance becomes a focus only when something goes wrong. And then teams blame each other. But when you treat it as a priority from development through production, it can actually bring teams closer together and foster healthy competition.

Klaus Enzenhofer explained how we measure performance needs to evolve. Visually Complete and Speed Index are new metrics delivered in both Dynatrace Synthetic and Real User monitoring. Both provide a more relevant measurement of performance based on the way customers perceive page rendering speed.

User Experience: It’s Not Just for eCommerce

Humana knows a lot about care. Providing healthcare insurance for millions of customers who depend increasingly on their online services is a 24/7 vocation. And so with the visibility of Dynatrace DC RUM and more, Humana is able to care for their customers’ experience. But to maximize their investments in training and APM expertise, they wanted to create an application-oriented center of excellence. Enter the “Death Star”—Humana’s collaboration center dedicated to application performance and end user experience management. Corey Workman, Technology Manager at Humana share that teams rotate through service tours in the Death Star and learn observation and optimization techniques. Since running the Death Star, MTTR has been significantly reduced, and we’re pretty sure, balance restored to The Force. The galaxy thanks you, Corey!

How Travis Perkins Achieves High-Performance eCommerce

Great businesses make decisions quickly and effectively to stay ahead of competition. In digital, the pace of change can make prioritizing investments a challenge. But Abdul al Tayib, eCommerce Operations Team Lead at Travis Perkins, has discovered how data can set you free. As he says, “Change driven by data eliminates wasted time chasing red herrings,” and that can add up to a serious advantage in the fast paced world of retail. At the end of the day, the business needs to understand how every investment returns back to the annual operating plan. For Abdul, Dynatrace makes business cases easy, because it shows the impact of performance on users and digital outcomes.

User Behavior Analytics: Taking RUM to the Next Level

When IT and digital business work together, great things can happen. But getting there can be a challenge. For the team at GraybaR, IT literally has a set at the table with Marketing. The result? Amazing intelligence about customers, search marketing and SEO efficiency, UX design and even merchandizing decisions! Allie Riordan, Digital Analyst and Don Benne, Infrastructure Delivery and Monitoring Manager at Graybar focus on maintaining constant, informal communication to get things done collaboratively. Together, they’ve been able to create amazing reports and analytics using Dynatrace UEM and the PureLytics Stream data API for exploration in Elasticsearch.

Digital Mastery with Speed and Joy at Panera

Any way you slice it, digital experience monitoring ensures the protection of your digital assets, and the ability to achieve better business outcomes. Performance is something that needs to be shared across teams: development, operations, performance engineering, marketing. And Dynatrace provides the depth of detail into understanding real user behavior, you can go well beyond even Google Analytics. Optimizing experience is a continuous process: benchmark your progress with synthetic tests, compare to your competitors and harden your services with load testing. Prashanth Karre, Sr. Manager DBA and Performance Engineering at Panera is happy to serve you a slice of “Dyna-bread” any time!

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