Client background

Client: Europe-based airline group

Industry: Airlines

Area of operations: Europe

Number of employees: Over 12000

Challenge

The client was implementing Total Operation System (TOPS), an integrated product suite designed to support all major processes in airline flight operations, to enhance safety and efficiency. However, the client’s TOPS application team was facing issues ranging from end users experiencing timeouts to lack of visibility into running methods within the applications, and unknown root cause for performance issues. These ongoing issues were putting the TOPS project go-live in jeopardy with the end users.

It was difficult to determine a root cause as TOPS is built on an incredibly diverse technology stack and has to integrate with different teams’ user experience, business services, optimizer, cache layers, database and the underlying infrastructure. 

Solution

Wipro team recommended and enabled an end-to-end Application Performance Monitoring tool (AppDynamics) that could analyze and gather information across the different nodes and components of the hugely diverse TOPS platform and help the team perform root cause analysis (RCA) with minimal effort. This not only helped fast-track the implementation cycles but also enabled smoother operations during steady state. It also give a single pane of visibility across app, end user, database and infra layer performance metrics. 

Wipro team along with Appdynamics team, implemented a solution that involved picking nodes from each layer and instrumenting those using AppDynamics agents to enable RCA of the issues.

A quick look at a couple of use cases: 

1. We instrumented Appdynamics agents in PT (Performance Testing) and UAT (User Acceptance Testing) environments and identified bottlenecks in all the layers for e.g. some of the pages were taking close to 30 seconds to load and the underlying reason was that 31 different resources were being loaded on a single page, thereby raising the timelines. A fix to that problem was to consolidate all the different JS files being used into one single JS file.
2. In another instance, we identified that database calls, as part of the business transaction, were taking more than 17 seconds. This made up almost 80% of the time taken for that entire transaction. It became evident immediately that the poorly indexed databases were causing queries to scan through 2.6 million rows of data causing the query to run for more than 45 seconds. 

Business impact

The client’s TOPS team fixed all application performance issues and gained total performance visibility and a consolidated view across their system with a single pane of glass.

They were able to

• Perform RCA and identify the problem with minimal effort and time (~ in 15-20 minutes)
• Fix bug in development stages saving hundreds of developer hours
• Fine-tune the queries causing the slowness in the application
• Resize application environment
• Accelerate go-live

Quote

“Post instrumentation of APM agents across layers of the applications all the way till data base, we were able to triangulate the issues quickly, along with user interactions. These key inputs were given to the development team for further improvement in the performance of the application.”

- Ankur Jalpota, Practice Head (BSM & AIOPS), Cloud Infrastructure Services, Wipro