AutoNation uses AppDynamics to see across its application delivery chain.

It’s all about the journey – and breaking down silos

For years, AutoNation relied on a disparate mix of tools and systems to keep an eye on application performance. This siloed approach to monitoring and management created visibility gaps that forced its IT teams into a reactive position in their respective corners.

“It seemed like we had some kind of application or infrastructure issue to deal with nearly every day,” Rasner recalls. “And because the personnel responsible for maintaining and supporting our technology didn’t have visibility outside their operational areas, they weren’t able to see the problems coming — we were flying blind until a call came in from an affected associate.”

As the company moved away from the traditional on-premises data center model and began adding more flexible, scalable cloud platforms to its existing infrastructure, it became clear that the situation could not stand. AutoNation needed to connect its AppOps and NetOps teams and provide them with deep, actionable insights across the entire ecosystem in order to put its visionary plans in place.

“We have so many exciting things going on, from modernizing existing applications to building new ones in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds from the ground up,” says Keith Kelly, Chief Architect at AutoNation. “But despite all this advancement, the lack of a single source of truth about how every system and application was performing significantly increased the risk of downtime and outages that could negatively impact customers and our internal teams.”

According to Kelly, the practical implications of those visibility gaps created some friction and finger-pointing between the IT organization and customer-facing teams.

“We have so many interconnected systems that one application may be dependent on 15 others, and an issue with any of them could create a ripple effect that might cause an online transaction to fail or make it more difficult for our associates to effectively assist our customers in real time,” he says. “When the buyer journey is directly affected, it erodes our business stakeholders’ trust in our technology and the personnel that support it.”

Constantly moving forward and bridging gaps

In an effort to bridge the gap between its IT teams and gain real-time visibility into the health and performance of its entire application ecosystem, AutoNation deployed AppDynamics to accelerate its leading-edge digital transformation.

AppDynamics’ extensive, industry-leading monitoring capabilities that provide comprehensive observability across the full technology stack made the decision a virtual no-brainer.

AutoNation IT teams use AppDynamics to see into every component of their application delivery chain — including end-user and back-end applications deployed across on-premises and cloud environments — from a single platform. AppOps and NetOps now speak the same language and can work together to rapidly pinpoint the root causes of application issues down to the code level, quickly resolve them, and keep the entire operation running at peak performance.

“Splunk AppDynamics provides a common view across our AWS, Azure, and on-premises applications, databases, and server infrastructure, delivering real-time, actionable insights based on transactions that help us improve our customers’ experiences,” Kelly explains. “Since multiple dependencies exist across our application ecosystem, the ability to see the entire flow in one place is an exceptionally powerful capability that accelerates troubleshooting and incident resolution and, ultimately, leads to a better experience across the board for our customers and associates.”

AppDynamics provides even more value: Rasner believes that his teams’ ability to understand the impact of application performance on the broader business is what will allow the company to make the most significant improvements and successfully execute its visionary plans now and into the future.

“Unlike other tools that simply tell you when something’s wrong, AppDynamics actually correlates data and alerts to help us proactively address the underlying causes of potential performance degradation before they affect the customer experience and, in turn, our bottom line,” he says. “More importantly, the code we build now reports directly back to a single, configurable dashboard that gives us a true 360-degree perspective of every application, database, and system so we can set, monitor, and manage specific baseline thresholds across every user touch point with exacting precision.”

Paving the way for the future

Both Rasner and Kelly agree few solutions could have made the positive impact on AutoNation’s sophisticated operations that AppDynamics has. Delivered as a service, it frees the company’s IT teams from having to manage yet another platform while delivering unprecedented visibility, control, and direct correlation between every activity happening in the application environment and the frontline user experience.

“In this new world, you have to stay ahead of the game; you can’t remain in reactionary mode. AppDynamics has allowed us to gain a proactive point of view — we now have the ability to look at our applications, databases, and underlying infrastructure; correlate event data; and get ahead of issues before they happen,” Rasner says. “And now that our developers have metrics to understand ahead of time how anything they produce can or will impact other systems across the company, it’s completely reshaped our approach to how we create and deploy new services during our transformation.”

Kelly feels that while AppDynamics has been instrumental in dramatically reducing critical service interruptions, the bigger impact has been on the company’s culture and interactions between teams. “AppDynamics has helped us reduce our severity 1 tickets by up to 90%, which is a huge accomplishment in and of itself,” he says. “But more importantly, it's allowed teams on both the IT and business sides to sort of lock arms and focus on what they're trying to do, as opposed to one side blaming the other and spending an exorbitant amount of time defending their turf.”

As the company continues pushing the boundaries of the automotive services industry, Cisco will be there to provide the infrastructure optimization, network monitoring, performance management, and security products needed to support AutoNation’s vision.

“Transforming a business is difficult enough on its own, but revolutionizing an industry is a totally different beast. Every new idea, tool or concept — every mobile app feature, next-generation technology, or interactive experience — has the potential for either a hugely positive or massively negative impact on our bottom line,” Rasner explains. “Having a solution like AppDynamics in place gives us the confidence to aggressively pursue innovative products and programs that will fundamentally change how people participate in the automotive customer journey while significantly reducing the risk we have to take to do it. And that’s an exciting feeling.”