​SAI Global adds app monitoring for new ecommerce platform

Sydney-based risk management firm SAI Global recently deployed a new ecommerce platform aimed at growing market share and improving end user experience. But as Steve Kinsey, GM of Knowledge, Digital, and Application Performance at SAI Global, told ZDNet, the company required an application performance management (APM) solution to monitor the new platform -- and make sure SAI Global was getting the most bang for its buck.

The new platform was one of the first to be deployed in the public cloud on Amazon Web Services, Kinsey said, noting this meant traditional server and application monitoring practices used on internally hosted platforms were no longer sufficient.

"The platform is built utilising a number of off the shelf products and it was important for SAI Global to quickly understand the whole ecosystem in order to pinpoint where any potential performance issues were occurring," Kinsey explained.

SAI Global went out to the market to find a solution that covered a specific brief: "To proactively monitor the platform so that issues can be found and resolved before the customer is adversely impacted."

Kinsey said it was of high importance to the company that it adopted a solution that greatly reduced the downtime in the event of an issue or error occurring.

After trialling a number of solutions, SAI Global narrowed its options down to ones provided by Dynatrace and AppDynamics, selecting the latter to move forward with.

An initial proof of value that covered most of the basics required for platform monitoring was performed within two weeks with AppDymanics, Kinsey explained, a setup SAI Global continued to use and has been tuning and building on since.

The APM solution is also deployed in a test environment so that issues can be found and fixed before a release is shipped, Kinsey said.

Currently, it's just the application support and development teams that use the monitoring tools, but Kinsey said a wider rollout is planned to cover management and business users as well.

As the company's new ecommerce platform was built mobile-responsive, Kinsey said the AppDynamics product will be extended past the desktop.

"The ecommerce platform is a mobile responsive website and we will be using AppDynamics to measure performance on traditional desktop/laptops as well as mobile devices," he said.

"This helps us understand the true user experience and journeys through our application."

SAI Global's head office is located in Sydney, Australia. The company employs more than 2,000 people across 29 countries with 51 locations across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and Asia Pacific.

Customers and partners of SAI Global include City Bank, Canadian Energy Services, Victoria's Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, and law firm giants Gilbert + Tobin.