Esure selects dynaTrace to better manage its application environment

The online insurance company needed an end-to-end view of its infrastructure

Insurance company Esure has selected an application management solution from dynaTrace 4 (APM), following a proof of concept that completed in September of this year.

Esure had previously been using CA Wily Introscope for its APM, but Darren Edwards, IT service manager at Esure, explained to Computing that it was not sufficient, as it did not provide an end-to-end view of the company's infrastructure.

"We had been using CA Wily for more than five years, but it is a very component-centric product," said Edwards.

"It would monitor individual services, servers or java virtual machines (JVMs), but my support teams would have to put together a picture on what the overall impact of this might be," he added.

"I wanted to move towards getting a better view of what was going on from both a service level management perspective as well as being able to dive deeper into any issues that do occur to conduct a root cause analysis," he said.

The proof of concept (POC) using dynaTrace's technology ran for two weeks in September and was used in Esure's pre-production environment from the web front end through to the database at the back end.

"The POC went well, we were mostly impressed with how quickly dynaTrace was able to get it up and running in our complex environment," said Edwards.

Esure is running 10 Oracle databases at the back end, using Weblogic as its main application server and has Resin Apache for the web front end. Edwards indicated that Esure currently has 16 key JVMs, but the number of instances it is issuing is continuously growing.

"The main reason that we chose dynaTrace was for its PurePath technology, which allows for real-time monitoring of all transactions, end-to-end," said Edwards.

"It allows us to monitor problems at a service level, but also gives us the ability to dive deep into all transactions being captured".

Edwards hopes to conduct a full rollout of the solution in January 2012.

Esure is also looking to conduct a second phase rollout of dynaTrace 4, where it would look to investigate user experience through a browser agent that is offered.

"Another thing that attracted me to this solution was the possibility of moving into user experience monitoring," said Edwards.

"This moves it on from just looking at the web server through to the database, and pushes some scripting via the web servers into the browser to give full end-to-end traceability," he added.

"We would then be able to see when there is a delay in a web transaction being returned to the users from the datacentre. If there is a delay we can start to investigate what is going on in the browser".