Ecosystem Monitoring

APM tool implementation

Ecosystem Monitoring – APM tool implementation
14/08/2018 MHC
Applications migrated
Nodes
Timeline for successful completion

Client Problem

Launched in 2005, OpTier was a popular and well regarded APM vendor, however the company ceased its operations in May 2014. One of our clients, a tier one financial enterprise, was dependent on OpTier for its APM operations and faced significant risks following the vendor’s collapse. Some of these risks included:

Risk One

Operational risks to the applications while using the unsupported product.

Risk Two

Increased support costs while a replacement product was identified and implemented.

Risk Three

Limited progress in technology innovation while the legacy tool was in use.

MHC Approach

MHC’s Ecosystem Monitoring solution played a key part in providing its adoption services to the client (Tools Evaluation Services, Tools Implementation Services and Tools Operations Services), and following a comprehensive selection process, the client chose AppDynamics as its strategic APM solution and the replacement tool for OpTier.

To mitigate the OpTier risks, one of the key objectives during the delivery stages of AppDynamics was to fast-track the migration of all existing OpTier users, remove the dependency in the unsupported tool and enable the decommissioning of the legacy product. During the implementation stages of AppDynamics, MHC’s on-site team was planning and preparing for the product migration, focusing on the following tasks:

Project Planning

Defining the migration phases and timelines, listing the target migration clients by priority and complexity (identifying the edge cases in advance).

Early introduction of the new product

Using a comprehensive training strategy and providing users with access to intermediate environments for further product familiarisation.

Technical migration

Designed and documented the instrumentation and agent replacement processes, delivering an automated deployment and migration mechanism.

Result

Once the production AppDynamics environment was ready for clients on-boarding, our team of product experts executed the accelerated migration plan for more than 200 applications, across 1400 nodes, successfully completing the decommissioning of OpTier within a period of 3 months.

Due to the popularity of AppDynamics, many application teams who didn’t use OpTier were keen to on-board AppDynamics during the initial migration phases.Our on-site team took to the challenge and delivered an added value by deploying AppDynamics to more than 50 additional applications.