London School of Economics Aces Student Services With Splunk AppDynamics

Key Challenges

London School of Economics (LSE) struggled to deliver the speed, scale, and reliability its 12,000 students expect when database bottlenecks brought enrollment processes to a halt.

Key Results

With observability across its hybrid environment from Splunk AppDynamics, LSE cut webpage load times to milliseconds and eliminated 100% of database errors during undergraduate course enrollment.

LSE needs fast, reliable digital services during high-stress periods like course enrollment.

As the top ranked university in London and fifth ranked university globally, the London School of Economics (LSE) is a beacon among social sciences institutions. As if that wasn’t enough, it also counts 18 Nobel winners and 37 world leaders among its staff and former graduates. LSE sets a high standard for higher education at the international level. 

That includes its digital services for students and staff. From custom applications that allow faculty to build their curriculums, to year-round student services like attendance records, to time-sensitive academic processes like course registration, LSE’s software developers are committed to making these experiences as seamless and user-friendly as possible.

“The standard of services for our end-users is set by the digital services they use elsewhere in their lives, be it their mobile banking app or Instagram,” explains Software Developer Derek Alexander. “Our goal is to deliver equally rich levels of service in the education sector.”

The challenge for LSE was that its legacy systems could not keep up with these evolving demands. For instance, database processes would grind to a halt during peak periods like course enrollment, creating stress among students desperate to get into the courses that inspire them.

Outcomes

Eliminated hundreds of undergraduate registration errors
Cut load times for student-facing webpages from 15 seconds to milliseconds
Safeguarded data and improved governance with real-time security monitoring

High performance standards for higher education

In addition to managing various IT systems from different eras, LSE developers previously used open-source software to monitor system performance. While universally accessible, these solutions provided neither the visibility nor the insight into key metrics that LSE needed to truly understand its operations and eliminate performance issues at their source.

As the driving force behind LSE digital services, its software developers are always under pressure to meet student and staff expectations. That pressure intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic when students began enrolling in online and hybrid courses. In parallel, the shift to online learning opened the door to more international enrollments, which meant that in addition to delivering seamless experiences for 12,0000 students, Alexander and his team also needed to rebuild LSE applications to accommodate users in multiple time zones.

For example, timetables for students in China, Japan, and Southeast Asia were coded to automatically propose more morning courses so students could attend UK lectures despite the time difference. Similarly, North American timetables include more afternoon classes.

“The shift to hybrid learning brought about the biggest change to timetabling since universities were first established, and we had to redevelop our systems to evolve,” says Alexander. “But to do that and reimagine LSE’s environment for a hybrid student body, we needed greater visibility across our IT operations,” says Alexander.

LSE still maintains its campus-first mentality, focusing on delivering exceptional education and services to its students in person. However, the school also continues to strengthen its hybrid learning services, empowering students to access coursework and critical services wherever and whenever they need them.

AppDynamics gave us that observability so we can deliver exceptional experience to our students and secure their data without missing a step.

Derek Alexander Senior Software Developer, London School of Economics

Gaining observability across every piece of its IT environment

For instance, with LSE’s data growing and changing, the university’s database software began to deteriorate and slow down crucial services for students and staff. Webpages that previously loaded instantly took up to 15 seconds to load, creating unacceptable delays. AppDynamics revealed the source of the bottleneck to be a database querying issue, allowing Alexander and his team to eliminate the delay with a simple tweak to their code.

“A needle in a haystack is easy to find if you have a metal detector. AppDynamics is that metal detector for our team,” says Alexander. “Intractable problems hidden deep down in our systems are now laid out clearly in the code.”

One problem solved with AppDynamics was the recurring issue of slow browser performance for international students, particularly those in Asia. End-user monitoring of its online services and applications revealed the root cause of the delays as lagging data requests and content delivery to these remote regions. Guided by that insight, the team implemented a distributed content delivery network and relegated those delays to the past.

Lightning-fast services with zero errors

Course selection is a focal point for LSE students and faculty. Each year, thousands of students eagerly wait for registration to open so they can secure a spot in their preferred courses. But with LSE taking on more students, adding courses to its curriculum and straining its database with heavier workloads, registration also became a point of dissatisfaction when the university’s legacy systems could no longer cope with the yearly spike in demand.

To fix the issue, Alexander and his team began by simulating course registrations for a hundred students at a time. In parallel, they built custom dashboards in AppDynamics to understand why database performance faltered. The dashboards included key performance metrics from across the LSE IT environment, from CPU usage to data requests and errors per minute to database connection calls.

The result? Whenever students tried to enroll for multiple courses, the LSE registration platform would try to complete all the necessary database calls simultaneously, causing a bottleneck. Armed with this insight from AppDynamics APM, Alexander, and his team rewrote the code so that enrollments were processed one course at a time. The enrollment process now runs at lightning speed. Just as importantly, students went from receiving hundreds of error messages during the registration process to receiving none.

“We had thousands of students at the edge of their seats ready to register and managed to serve them with zero errors, which is a point of pride,” says Alexander. “We never would have been able to do that without AppDynamics.”

Stronger security, stronger governance

As for security, Cisco Secure Application will help LSE enhance its data monitoring and governance. The university uses several open-source libraries to feed its business applications, some of which have become attractive targets for exploits. With Cisco Secure Application, which Alexander and his team plan to roll out, they will be able to see which processes are running on their servers and which are most vulnerable to external threats.

“Static analysis tools are useful when you’re building and deploying applications, but they can’t show you which processes are actually running on your servers day-to-day,” says Alexander. “That’s what sets Cisco Secure Application apart, and we look forward to taking full advantage of the solution.”

For years, LSE relied on intuition and guesswork to optimize its IT systems and end-user experiences. Despite building its own systems over decades, these remained a black box until Alexander and his team began monitoring IT processes at a granular level with AppDynamics.

“We needed to see inside the black box, pick apart each process, and address our performance issues at their root,” says Alexander. “AppDynamics gave us that observability so we can deliver exceptional experience to our students and secure their data without missing a step.”

We had thousands of students at the edge of their seats ready to register and managed to serve them with zero errors, which is a point of pride. We never would have been able to do that without AppDynamics.

Derek Alexander Senior Software Developer, London School of Economics