Insights

The following post was written with significant contribution from Ravi Sama, BlueSky Solution Architect.

Never before have consumers held such high expectations for their buying journey. A simple glitch or subpar experience, and they jump ship to a competitor’s website, leaving abandoned carts and lost sales in their wake.

The trouble is that user experience and server performance hiccups aren’t always plain to see, requiring long, tedious sifting through logs, disparate tools, reports, and conference-calling third-party providers. And that’s just to identify the root of the problem, let alone fix it. Until now, that is.

Dynatrace for IBM Commerce

Earlier this month, Dynatrace became the first application performance management (APM) vendor to be certified by IBM as “Ready for IBM Commerce.”

This integration equips IT teams with deep visibility into all tiers of their eCommerce platform, enabling them to increase service levels and resolve problems faster, with minimal resources.

“The devil is in the details,” writes Dynatrace. “IBM WebSphere Commerce is robust and highly scalable. But you know the work is just beginning once your platform is in place, right?”

As Dynatrace describes its capabilities, “smart, adaptive alerts detail exactly which application component is accountable for the performance issue, removing the need for time-consuming problem reproduction by pinpointing the issue with code level detail.”

Here at BlueSky, we’ve used Dynatrace to fast-track an aggressive release cycle, says Ravi Sama, a solution architect on our team. “Dynatrace also plays a key role in load testing and capacity planning for our environment for the holidays,” he adds.

“We’ve identified pages that don’t deliver the best user experience using the UEM (User Experience Management) module and are constantly fine-tuning those pages.” To that end, Dynatrace’s notifications alert us when performance indicators hit predefined thresholds.

Sama reports that in the past three years, Dynatrace has helped BlueSky accomplish the following:

• Eliminated top 15 CPU hotspots.
• Eliminated the top 20 database hotspots.
• Added various layers of caching to our application while monitoring stability and improvements using Dynatrace after each change.
• Optimized various server configurations, including settings in java Heap, java Garbage Collection, Web Container Thread, database connection pool, and others.
• Optimized back-end fulfillment web service to improve front-end user experience.

Dynatrace has also helped us improve our server capacity by:

• Safely reducing the number of CPU cores on application servers.
• Increasing the number of Worklight (mobile) application servers.
• Increasing the number of Search servers.
• Increasing the amount of data cached in memory.

For business users, the above outcomes translate into speed: faster fixes, faster time to market, faster enhancements to the customer experience, and identification of issues before they become problems — all while reducing the load and burden on IT operations.

“We’re able to release new functionality at a fast pace while improving the user experience constantly,” says Sama, “and to make changes without negatively affecting server performance or user experience.”

Curious about how Dynatrace can slap a jetpack on your eCommerce site’s performance and user experience?

Let us hook you up with a free trial and walk you through best practices relevant to the challenges you face today. Drop us a note and we’ll gladly help you discern next steps and share what we’ve learned along the way.

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