Net-A-Porter selects AppDynamics to 'recognise and resolve bottlenecks and streamline infrastructure' says CIO

Hugh Fahy says AppDynamics is the most comprehensive solution on the market and allows the luxury retailer to meet key strategic IT objectives

Luxury fashion retailer Net-A-Porter Group has selected application intelligence platform AppDynamics to enable the company to recognise and resolve bottlenecks in its applications and streamline its infrastructure.

The company is also aiming to empower DevOps teams, and get its group operations team to move away from a siloed view of application performance.

Hugh Fahy, CIO at Net-A-Porter, told Computing that the luxury fashion retailer looked at a number of options in the application intelligence space but picked AppDynamics because it was the "most comprehensive solution".

"We chose AppDynamics because it gives us an integrated view of real-time performance and for its customisable dashboards, which give us end-to-end visibility across our application environment," he said.

"This allows our technology team to share information across our organisation, influencing better business decisions," he added.

The group has deployed AppDynamics across its three brands, Net-A-Porter, The Outnet and Mr Porter. IT has approximately 1,000 AppDynamics agents deployed across its hybrid cloud environments and will continue to scale the solution.

Fahy explained that AppDynamics has given Net-a-Porter the ability to unify monitoring for functions such as search, checkout and product comparison.

"Now we can spot potential application issues that were previously invisible, allowing us to improve operational stability and ultimately user experience. The increased visibility also gives us a better understanding of where computing resources are being used. Rather than investing in more hardware when performance is slowing, the software will allow us to recognise and resolve bottlenecks and streamline our infrastructure," he said.

He added that AppDynamics played a significant role in helping the firm meet some of its key strategic IT objectives, such as reducing the complexity of systems and increasing visibility into how they perform.

"We previously used multiple point-monitoring solutions, which didn't give us end-to-end visibility. The AppDynamics platform gives us a unified, real-time view of user experience, application performance and availability. That allows us to optimise the user experience, and it's hard to imagine our business without it," he said.