Client Overview
This manufacturing company produces a diverse and sustainable range of products. As one of the largest manufacturers in the United States and a major recycler in North America, the company provides products for heavy commercial purposes.
Goal: Increased Infrastructure Visibility
In 2023, the company sold millions of tons of product and recycled a comparable amount of materials. To deliver that output level, the organization has numerous plants nationwide, each with complex systems for managing operations.
Behind the scenes, their IT team works tirelessly to improve operational efficiency, relying on a complex system of integrated, mission-critical finance, inventory, and logistics applications. This infrastructure supports operations and provides real-time information that impacts the business down to the customer level.
Having invested significant resources in infrastructure modernization and being forward-thinking, they were looking for a solution that could identify system failures and their root causes to fix the issues before they negatively impacted the customer experience.
Specifically, they knew particular servers crashed periodically but couldn’t identify the source of the problem. This puts their team in a reactive state, waiting for the crash so they can rapidly fix it to minimize user disruption and impact on revenue (which could be significant if left unaddressed).
The Challenge
The team was unaware of any solution that could help them identify systems issues proactively across a complex infrastructure that managed operations for teams at numerous locations.
Improving Infrastructure Visibility with Dynatrace
Shadow-Soft had supported the manufacturer's infrastructure and design for over 9 years when the team approached us with their goal.
As a consulting firm with a team with 15+ years of experience in systems engineering, infrastructure design, modernization, automation, and visibility, we knew several observability solutions that could have supported their needs.
We recommended Dynatrace based on our experience with the tool and the outcomes we helped other clients achieve.
Dynatrace is an enterprise-level observability tool that uses an agent system to monitor the full stack of an organization from a single, AI-powered data platform. While it is an out-of-the-box SaaS tool, there is an initial lift for properly implementing, configuring dashboards, and ensuring adoption for a business to get the most out of the platform.
Set-up and adoption can be a time-intensive process that scales with an organization’s complexity. The team asked us to implement the platform and manage adoption, giving them more time to focus on other critical operational tasks.
Our Dynatrace Implementation and Adoption Process
Over 15 weeks, the Shadow-Soft team worked along with the client to install and integrate Dynatrace into their existing IT infrastructure.
Once the platform was in place, we fine-tuned the tool to avoid irrelevant alert notifications by ensuring the proper guardrails were in place for monitoring and notifications. Considering the client's IT infrastructure's complexity, calibrating the tool to ignore noise and identify anomalies was an extensive process. However, ensuring the platform provided the most accurate, actionable information to the team instead of noise was critical.
From there, we validated the metrics and built automated reporting around them, ensuring the right team members received the correct data.
With Dynatrace set up correctly, we managed the tool while working on user adoption. Our certified Dynatrace implementation team worked with the client to familiarize them with the platform, establish best practices for responding to issues, and ensure the team used all available, relevant features.
We started the adoption process by building the proper reporting and dashboards to provide insights the team needed to make critical decisions promptly. With the correct information, Dynatrace empowered more users to make impactful decisions that moved the business closer to desired outcomes.
Over time, we transitioned into an advisory role. As the team adds new tools and creates new requirements, we help reconfigure the systems to report the right metrics.
Our Step-By-Step Process:
- Review the POC Dynatrace environment for potential usage.
- Determine integration points and network layout usage for ActiveGate needs.
- Install and configure ActiveGates (as needed).
- Onboard users/groups and Dynatrace environment configuration for tenants.
- Install and configure agents.
- Validate collected metrics in Dynatrace.
- Create and automate dashboard and reporting.
- Customize Dynatrace alerts.
- Tune libraries and methods for custom monitoring (if not auto-captured).
- Tune process groups (as needed).
- Tune naming parameters (as required).
- Provide ongoing administration assistance to support Dynatrace adoption.
- Scheduled regular sessions for troubleshooting monitored system issues and team mentoring on leveraging Dynatrace for root-cause analysis.
Key Features
Dynatrace allows the client to quickly identify system failures and trace the history behind the inability to troubleshoot the root cause. This visibility puts the client's IT team in a proactive position to address issues before they negatively impact the customer experience.
Features:
- Increased infrastructure resilience and performance
- Increase IT operational efficiencies by removing manual problem resolution
- Relevant system alerts (not noise)
- Improve customer experience with end-to-end visibility of the customer journey
- Analytics for identifying areas for improving customer service
- Improved collaboration between teams
- Better insights into infrastructure performance
- Proactively solve problems during pre-production
- Ensure safe and secure workload deployment
Implementation and Adoption Challenges
While most projects have challenges, our background in systems engineering and experience with the client provided a smooth implementation, onboarding, and adoption process.
Tools
We chose Dynatrace as a solution for the client because they invented tracing, which drives observability tools. Over the last few years, the Dynatrace Team has rebuilt the tool to provide better visibility and improve use. The platform also offers clear, transparent pricing.
As Premier Dynatrace Partners, our team is certified to support the platform's deployment, calibration, and adoption.
Seamless Integration With Existing Systems
Dynatrace’s one-agent model allowed for seamless integration with the client's systems. With our help, we successfully implemented the platform in 15 weeks without encountering any significant issues.
New Platform Identifies Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
The client's Dynatrace platform helps the team avoid costly crashes that would negatively impact the customer experience. The result is a more resilient application infrastructure, and an IT team empowered with insights to keep operations running.
Dynatrace helps the client:
- Identify potential service and application issues before customers experience them.
- Identify server crashes and root causes across a complex IT infrastructure for rapid recovery and future prevention.
- Unified communication across tools with the same language, leading to increased collaboration.
The Future
Today, the manufacturer controls the Dynatrace system with Shadow-Soft, which provides ongoing adoption and calibration support.
As a forward-thinking company that embraces technology to drive business success, the manufacturer continuously looks for new ways to bring more value to customers. They trust Shadow-Soft as a consultative partner to find new ways to deliver industry-defining customer experiences through their existing tech stack.