Case study: Performance monitoring at NISA prevents millions in lost orders

Retailer selects dynaTrace over SolarWinds and New Relic to rectify performance issue

Independent retailer and wholesaler NISA has fixed a problem with its ordering portal that could have lost it millions of pounds by implementing IT services provider Compuware's performance monitoring tool dynaTrace.

The retailer, which has 800 of its own stores across the UK and also acts as a buying consortium for 4,500 other retail stores, had problems after it refreshed its ordering portal, which retailers connect to to share product orders and product files as well as business documents like invoices.

"The refreshed ordering portal was successful in delivering benefits to our retailers, allowing them to order directly with us at later times during the day than the manual orders we used to take. The online platform meant that we could take the brunt of all of our orders - about 1,200 orders a day - within the last half an hour of our cut-off time. As a consequence of doing that, we started experiencing some performance issues," head of IT at NISA, David Morris, told Computing.

NISA worked with Intechnica to attempt to identify the problems.

"We wanted to know if it was down to load, application related, or if there were problems with our database or platform. What we felt at that time was that it was difficult to understand where the problem existed, so we did a trawl of the marketplace to understand what the best tools available to us were," he said.

NISA looked at Compuware's dynaTrace tool after examining similar, competing tools, including SolarWinds and New Relic.

"We were very impressed with dynaTrace and, as a result of its features, we managed to identify some configuration changes that we would benefit from on the application tier and on the web tier and working with our vendor and software provider we managed to identify where the key areas were and restore the performance in the system," said Morris.

Case study: Performance monitoring at NISA prevents millions in lost orders

Retailer selects dynaTrace over SolarWinds and New Relic to rectify performance issue

Deployment
DynaTrace was selected 20 months ago.

"We have three web servers, which sit at the front of the online ordering application. We introduced dynaTrace initially in front of the web servers to monitor the traffic that was coming through and put the content switch and load balancer into the database to understand what the impact of that was," said Morris.

He added: "When we managed to understand the information presented to us, we rolled out the tool across all three of our server estates and that gave us the ability to drill down on any particular area with the help of graphs which show what is a good performance and a bad performance."

Morris said that NISA was then able to identify whether or not it was experiencing third-party problems or issues within the application itself. This diagnostic tool eventually led to a 46 per cent improvement in user experience when using the system.

It took one year after selecting dynaTrace to deliver the application changes, though, and within the past nine months these changes have stabilised. NISA is now looking to use the tool for other purposes.

"We brought it in as a troubleshooting tool because of the performance issue. This meant that we were missing our orders. For a company like ours, which is taking about £30m of orders a week, this meant that only a small amount of missed orders results in a large cost to us. So the tool quickly paid for itself by ensuring that all orders get to the retailers on time," said Morris.

He added: "We're now using dynaTrace through all our development and testing of any new functionality processes. It's a massive benefit to us and gives us confidence in release management (that what we are releasing is not going to have performance overheads) and we see it as a crucial part of our testing and validation process."