City of Munich Improves User Experiences with Splunk AppDynamics

Key Challenges

To deliver optimal digital experiences in its increasingly complex IT landscape, the city needed visibility into its systems to identify and resolve failures and performance problems fast.

Key Results

The city’s IT team can proactively identify and fix issues before citizens or employees notice. Performance problems and failures are infrequent, and digital experience has significantly improved.

The City of Munich is a pioneer in the digitalization of citizen services.

It operates two data centers and offers modern, cloud-based services that complement on-site offerings. Citizens no longer have to go to city offices to access services but can do so conveniently online.

However, with the city’s continued expansion of digital offerings, the IT landscape is becoming increasingly complex. To provide a consistently positive experience for citizens, the city needed to improve visibility into its systems. In the case of failures and performance problems, it was often not immediately clear to those responsible where exactly the error in the application lay. To overcome these challenges, the City of Munich’s IT service provider, it@M, sought a powerful monitoring solution.

An internal task force evaluated the leading application performance monitoring solutions on the market. They were looking for a provider that could help proactively identify and resolve critical problems so they could optimize the user experience. The task force decided to implement AppDynamics after it performed well in test cases. "Our goal was to implement a powerful monitoring solution that would deliver improved service and availability to our employees and customers. We therefore looked at various proven tools with a high market reputation and, in the end, decided on AppDynamics,” says Bernhard Leicht, Team Leader for Middleware and Monitoring at the City of Munich.

Outcomes

Established proactive monitoring to identify problems and root causes
Improved user experience for citizens
Gained a uniform view of the system landscape in AppDynamics

Improved digital experience for citizens

In the past, when the City of Munich’s IT team handled and solved IT problems reactively. The search for the cause of errors often took a lot of time due to the number of services and dependencies. This led to dissatisfaction among citizens and, ultimately, to avoidable damage to the reputation of city services.

With AppDynamics, the IT team can now proactively detect and fix system problems. The reduction in troubleshooting time means that outages and performance difficulties can often be solved before the citizens and employees notice them.

"The expanded and powerful monitoring with AppDynamics helps us gain deeper insights into the overall application environment. This allows us to carry out better error analyses and, thus, offer increased digital service quality for our employees of the City of Munich and, in particular, for our citizens," says Bernhard Leicht.

The expanded and powerful monitoring with AppDynamics helps us gain deeper insights into the overall application environment. This allows us to carry out better error analyses and, thus, offer increased digital service quality.

Bernhard Leicht Leader for Middleware and Monitoring, City of Munich

Uniform view of the system landscape in AppDynamics

To provide insights into the application environment, it@M uses tools to map the basic areas of performance and availability. AppDynamics now complements this with end-to-end visibility across all application components and dependencies. Even purchased applications can be precisely examined. Performance of individual transactions is captured across application, infrastructure, and network.

Various City of Munich teams responsible for development, infrastructure, and IT architecture can now support each other in troubleshooting. AppDynamics provides a holistic view that helps them manage the increased complexity and deliver an optimal user experience.

AI-based error detection provides clarity

Another challenge the City of Munich faced was alerting, which in the past often resulted in false alarms. Sometimes, the monitoring team had to comb through several hundred messages per day, very few of which related to actual problems. AppDynamics takes an AI-based approach to this challenge and relies on dynamic thresholds that continuously compare application behavior with historical data about the system load.

For example, if there is a particularly high number of users during the usual peak hours and the systems are running under peak load, AppDynamics recognizes this natural deviation and does not sound an alarm. If, on the other hand, there are unscheduled load peaks, performance problems, or even failures, the responsible team receives a message. The automated error analysis then helps to locate the error, allowing the responsible employees to focus on its elimination.

Stable IT infrastructure

Thanks to AppDynamics, the City of Munich has managed to get a grip on the complexity of its digital infrastructure and deliver stability in its IT infrastructure. There are now fewer performance problems and failures, which is why the user experience has improved significantly. This is noticeable for citizens in systems such as the city’s residents registration system. Through AppDynamics support of OpenTelemetry, the city can also use a freely available and globally recognized open-source standard for data collection and then further process this data.

The City of Munich’s implementation has not reached its final stage. Lifecycles are still being optimized and automated and monitoring fine-tuned

"We have succeeded in greatly reducing the outages that citizens and employees encountered in ensuring greater service quality and efficiency in our IT department. So, we have already mapped out our next steps towards expansion to other areas,” says Leicht.

We have succeeded in greatly reducing the outages that citizens and employees encountered in ensuring greater service quality and efficiency in our IT department.

Bernhard Leicht Leader for Middleware and Monitoring, City of Munich