CCC drives reliability of the P&C insurance economy with Splunk AppDynamics

Key Challenges

Applications teams, IT, and Operations used multiple tools for monitoring, observability, and alerting, which hindered their ability to quickly find and fix problems and increased costs.

Key Results

AppDynamics helps CCC unify and more fully automate site monitoring to proactively protect system performance and deliver better customer experiences, so teams can focus on innovation and growth.

The ability to act in real time protects CCC customers, and their brand.

For tens of thousands of collision repairers, hundreds of insurance carriers, and thousands of auto parts manufacturers, nearly all data related to filing insurance claims, locating replacement parts, and managing car repairs runs through CCC Intelligent Solutions' cloud platform.

With more than $100 billion processed through CCC each year — and millions of consumers financially and emotionally impacted by car accidents — the stakes are high for the P&C insurance software provider to maintain operational integrity.

“Our systems support more than 30,000 businesses that serve millions of people daily. We can't tolerate any type of outage," says John Goodson, Chief Technology Officer at CCC.

CCC's site reliability engineering (SRE) needs to be highly proactive. In addition to predicting system events, the company must notify its engineering team of any potential issues before they affect the platform's services and operability.

“We have an extremely complex technical infrastructure,” explains Shelly Einhorn, Vice President of Telematics Technology at CCC. “All our systems need to speak to one another continually to satisfy different use cases and provide visibility into all touchpoints.”

Outcomes

Increased efficiency through a simplified and automated monitoring system
Improved proactive system performance and issue-resolution monitoring
Streamlined communication through a centralized dashboard and alert system

Proactive customer-level observability on a single platform

CCC needs system visibility and the ability to focus on customer-centric issues and patch performance problems — a major reason why it selected AppDynamics.

Evolutio, an AppDynamics implementation partner, introduced advanced capabilities of the AppDynamics observability platform to CCC, giving the software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform provider better visibility into its technology stack. CCC’s engineering team standardized their site reliability operations on AppDynamics and adopted these advanced application performance monitoring (APM) and business analytics features.

AppDynamics and Evolutio helped CCC to better proactively identify potential system issues and pinpoint the root cause — even when the issues are outside of their environment. For example, when an insurance user expressed concern about performance issues in an application programming interface (API) integration, AppDynamics identified the source of the issue and determined the slowdown had resulted from a network change on the customer’s system.

CCC's teams can view critical information such as service speed, flow activity, and server health on customizable AppDynamics dashboards, which pull performance and usage data from all customer application and network data sources and automatically alert engineers if anything's amiss. Tailored reporting capabilities let CCC monitor system- and customer-level infrastructure to account for each customer bucket. For instance, CCC can compare its infrastructure and application performance metrics for insurance firms with those for car repair shops.

We're transforming our operational model to make it more effective and efficient, and AppDynamics is right there in the mix of that. This effort around observability is helping our organization evolve.

Shelly Einhorn Vice President of Telematics Technology, CCC Intelligent Solutions

Predictable performance improves the customer experience

AppDynamics takes visibility a step further with proactive analytics. Engineering teams not only see active slowdowns but also gain predictive information on where issues may arise. Like its dashboards, AppDynamics' notification system is customizable, allowing users to specify the levels of concern that trigger an alert.

“Our engineers have at their fingertips dashboards and screens that provide alerts, so they can drill down and see where system events may occur,” says Einhorn. “Real-time analysis and information provides highly efficient, continuous monitoring.”

The ultimate benefit of AppDynamics is an improved customer experience for CCC’s clients that process automotive-related transactions. By identifying and preventing system issues before they happen, CCC delivers consistent performance and reliability of its platform.

“Let's say there's a performance issue, unexplained terminations, or something else that's not normal,” says Goodson. “To the customer, that's their view of your business. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) is 82, which is higher than that of Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple — higher than companies that are perceived to offer great customer experiences. A lot of that is because of how we keep our systems available.”

Quick time to value with AppDynamics and Evolutio

CCC has gained significant value from working with Evolutio. In addition to guiding CCC through adoption, Evolutio helped create rules that automatically trigger alerts when AppDynamics detects deviations from CCC standard service-level performance.

“We view Evolutio as expert partners,” Goodson explains. “We bring them in, and they immediately know what to do. They've seen best practices and worst practices. They know the fastest way to get to the right answer and how to implement it on the inside. I can't say enough positive things about them helping us get quick time-to-value with AppDynamics.”

“We’ve been pleased to help CCC develop a strategy that takes into account, not just IT transformation overall, but the specific tactics that can be used to drive positive changes along the way,” says Laura Vetter, Co-Founder and CTO, Evolutio. “Part of that strategy is driving a culture change where everyone takes observability into account. We look forward to focusing on what the business and the customer need now, with an eye on CCC’s broader business transformation long term.”

AppDynamics helped CCC's engineering teams ramp up efficiency by focusing their time and effort on problem-solving activities. Automatic alerts triggered by system pressure or confirmed performance issues eliminate the need for engineers to wait for something to happen. AppDynamics also provides easy-to-read dashboards that help teams focus on problem-causing issues.

“AppDynamics has simplified how we view performance and availability,” says Einhorn. “As engineers, we tend to over-engineer monitoring and alerts, which can create noise and makes it hard to get to the root of potential problems. AppDynamics streamlined our approach tremendously, enabling teams to cut through the noise and focus on what matters.”

Improving cross-department collaboration

AppDynamics also helps CCC improve cross-departmental collaboration. With many teams covering everything from operations to development to estimation workflows, CCC is pleased to see the AppDynamics platform drive communication across all its DevOps functions.

“We're transforming our operational model to make it more effective and efficient, and AppDynamics is right there in the mix of that. This effort around observability is helping our organization evolve,” Einhorn says. “It provides an opportunity for our teams to spend less time on system monitoring and management and more time focusing on innovation and things that make the business grow.”

Einhorn notes that these efforts are bringing the operations and development sides closer together. “The AppDynamics dashboards, monitoring and alerting features are helping teams communicate better, so they are speaking the same language and thinking about their transactions as they affect one another. Our journey right now is continuing to work along those lines,” she says.