Bridging the gap

Application performance management (APM) had long been a priority for the team, who wanted to bridge the gap between IOT’s infrastructure services and the many agency applications it supports. Their AppDynamics implementation began with a proof of concept for two of Indiana’s most critical constituent-facing agencies: Indiana Professional Licenses Agency (PLA) and the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV).

In the case of PLA, AppDynamics revealed bottlenecks across the agency’s infrastructure and applications, including slowdowns with its SQL database, latency between the database and end users, and code-level issues with the PLA application itself. Armed with that information, IOT was able to eliminate the bottlenecks and improve PLA’s services overnight.

“That first POC was a turning point. We understood right away that AppDynamics could deliver tremendous value across our organization and began to expand our rollout to other agencies,” says Welsh.

Informing state strategy with performance data

IOT now uses AppDynamics to support 74 state agencies and counting, making government services faster, more performant, and more reliable for the citizens of Indiana.

Another major test came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Indiana Department of Workforce Development (DWD) saw unemployment applications jump from 27,000 to 630,000 vouchers per week. It was a trying moment for the state, and slow web page load times and frequent server crashes made the DWD’s online services cumbersome and slow. Within days of deploying AppDynamics, IOT was able to pinpoint and resolve the DWD bottlenecks, cutting load times for its claimant homepage from 28 seconds to just 400 milliseconds.

DWD is not alone. State agencies across Indiana appreciate the value AppDynamics delivers, both in terms of performance and the insight it provides into how they can enhance their citizen-facing services.

“I create monthly metrics based on the application score cards from AppDynamics that tell the story of the health of our business-critical applications to the executive branch of our state government,” says Welsh.

Adding the secret sauce of professional services

Welsh was also wowed by the support that AppDynamics Professional Services provided throughout IOT’s implementation. “AppDynamics Professional Services helped us configure our services, showed us where to look for bottlenecks, and highlighted where we needed to improve our code,” he says.

This support also helped IOT add value in the form of direct access to AppDynamics experts. “The secret sauce is getting state agencies on the phone with Splunk AppDynamics experts, who are total wizards at walking them through their needs and finding workable solutions,” adds Welsh.

Next up for IOT is the migration of its on-prem IT Infrastructure to the Microsoft Azure cloud. As Welsh explains, the ability to monitor and optimize performance across the stack, from infrastructure to end-user applications, will be crucial to its cloud journey and to gain support from IOT’s agency network.

“AppDynamics helped us build stock with agencies like never before, and we’re going to need that engagement to bring our cloud vision to life,” says Welsh. “Looking at where we are today compared with just a few years ago, all signs point to us making that happen.”