Carhartt delivers frictionless customer experiences with Splunk AppDynamics

The cost of downtime is high

“Our ERP system is on-premises, some of our inventory and warehouse systems are in the cloud, and our website runs on a third-party service,” Masey explains. “The cost of an hour of downtime anywhere in our environment can reach into the millions of dollars in lost revenue. It’s also an hour that our customers might not get the buying experience they’ve come to expect, but making sure every system is working flawlessly 24/7 is a huge challenge when disparate systems are monitored individually without much automation or a unified view of everything.”

The complex, sprawling IT environment features applications and systems that integrate and interoperate with one another, creating an end-to-end ecosystem for delivering high-quality products to customers everywhere but it opens the company up to significant operational risk.

Front-end systems like customer facing e-commerce and retail partner sites connect to an order management system that communicates with SAP for ERP and inventory and warehouse management systems. Limited insight across all of its Tier-1 critical applications and data stores combined with the pressure to consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences at every stage of the process left Carhartt’s IT team fighting fires without all the information they needed to quickly pinpoint and resolve issues.

“Our MSO application, which is responsible for materials planning and inventory control that powers our entire just-in-time manufacturing and distribution model, is 100% essential to our success but became the single most significant choke point for our operations,” Carhartt’s Supervisor of Systems Engineering Mike Karasienski states. “The teams supporting the MSO application didn’t have good enough visibility to understand whether a slowdown or outage was actually a problem with the application itself or caused by something on the infrastructure side. It underscored just how important granular visibility and root cause analysis are to our success.”

Actionable intelligence for long-term success

Seizing the opportunity to completely rethink how the company approaches IT infrastructure and operations by prioritizing visibility across the whole technology stack, Carhartt adopted Splunk AppDynamics to gain greater operational insights and help ensure the long-term success of its aggressive digital transformation initiative.

Carhartt is using AppDynamics to unify previously disparate application and network monitoring efforts. AppDynamics delivers a single solution for observability into every Tier- 1, mission-critical application, such as its SAP HANA ERP, e-commerce and main customer sites, and the middleware layers that connect with warehouse, inventory, and distribution systems.

“AppDynamics gives us a real-time look into what's happening in every database, application, and cloud instance so we can understand how our data is flowing and proactively identify potential service issues that may impact our ability to serve our customers,” Masey says. “That kind of full-stack visibility is so vital when customers expect a frictionless experience every time.”

AppDynamics’ business performance monitoring tool, Business iQ, and single-page application monitoring capabilities are shining light on previously obscured systems and activities. The company uses Business iQ to monitor and visualize each step of the customer journey — from website visit through fulfillment — over a secure and expansive Cisco-based network.

“Cisco is our network vendor of choice because it’s proven to be a stable and reliable foundation for our whole operation, even as we expand our SD-WAN,” Karasienski says. “Today all 35 of our retail stores run on Cisco Meraki solutions and, in the near future, so will our manufacturing and corporate sites, all of which will connect seamlessly and securely to our SAP platform for even greater centralization and standardization.”

AppDynamics makes it possible to watch each e-commerce application and retail location closely for excessive logins and other potential security vulnerabilities, as well as monitor the flow of traffic between retail and partner channels and the customer site to SAP to instantly understand when channels are up or down, or messages aren’t flowing properly.

“The message flow used to be between an FTP server and SAP, managed by a third-party SAP app that really couldn’t be monitored very easily,” explains Edward Ferron, the Principal Consultant at JMFerron and a strategic IT partner to the Carhartt team. “Now we can direct all of that traffic coming into SAP from each channel to AppDynamics and use the Business iQ dashboards to investigate why our auto order- blocking may have triggered, quickly identify problematic messages that aren't reaching their destination, and pinpoint exactly where the problem is so we can fix it before it impacts customer orders.”

Meanwhile, the MSO system for inventory planning and management that used to experience periodic availability or performance issues impacting order fulfillment is now performing at peak capacity with AppDynamics. “We’ve never had dedicated application support for MSO, but with AppDynamics, we don’t really need it,” Karasienski says. “If there’s any slowdown, service degradation, or other performance issue, we can just jump into AppDynamics’ report metrics to see both the microservices running in Kubernetes and the application itself and determine where the problem is and then communicate with the right parties — the vendor or our own operators — to resolve it.”

Playing the long game

Change doesn’t happen overnight. Radical change, like Carhartt’s digital transformation with an eye on future-proofing a legacy brand takes even longer. Masey says that few solutions could have enabled the strides the company has made in its initiative quite like AppDynamics. As a result, Carhartt has virtually eliminated costly service or application downtime, helping it to avoid millions of dollars in lost revenue as well as erosion of customers’ trust in the purchasing process.

“AppDynamics helps us visualize the key components of our environment and prioritize issues by the impact they’ll have on the business and our customers so we’re using our limited time and resources more productively,” he says. “The tool does the work of an entire team, so we’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars just in salaries and operating costs without sacrificing any visibility, control, or performance.”

Masey and team acknowledge that there are still some hurdles to overcome in the future, particularly when it comes to cloud expansion, that will require the full-stack observability that only AppDynamics can deliver.

“The cloud — specifically infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — is the future of this industry and our business. As we transition more workloads to Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS, we’ll need to be able to see into every database, connection, and application to optimize performance around the clock,” he says. “AppDynamics is the only solution to offer visibility into every corner of our environment and identify areas of weakness and opportunity. And because it’s so intuitive, everyone on our team regardless of title or role will have the ability to keep the engine running, supporting the goal of providing exceptional products and experiences for this generation of customers and generations to come.”