AppDynamics, the leading Java/.NET application performance management (APM) solution for distributed web applications, today announced that Karavel.com has selected AppDynamics as its APM solution over CA Wily and Compuware Dynatrace. Karavel is the number one travel site in France, receiving four million unique visitors a month and helping millions of travelers reach their destinations around the world.

Karavel performed a thorough evaluation of three APM solutions: AppDynamics, CA Wily, and Compuware Dynatrace. The company selected AppDynamics due to its fit for a high-volume production environment, its ease of use, and its lowest cost of ownership.

Guillaume Postaire, Infrastructure Architect for Karavel, said, "We needed to gain clear visibility into the performance of our production web application and quickly troubleshoot problems by getting code-level diagnostics. From that standpoint, AppDynamics proved to be the best fit that we found in the application performance management market. They were also extremely easy to work with: AppDynamics didn't make us jump through hoops to get access to a trial license, and they allowed us to self-deploy their product in our own production environment."

Karavel's Challenges
Ensuring that its APM solution could run in a production environment was critical for Karavel. The company had recently transitioned from a monolithic Weblogic architecture to a SOA/distributed environment that included over 200 Tomcat servers, multiple databases, and asynchronous web services communicating to multiple web partners. The site processes about 3,000 transactions per minute.

But such a complex architecture meant that the Operations and Development teams at Karavel found themselves facing a variety of issues, including site performance problems as a result of non-optimized SQL queries, open source framework performance bugs, and resource leakages. They attempted to resolve these issues using logs as well as thread and memory dumps, but ended up with an average Mean-Time-to-Resolution of over three hours.

Mr. Postaire noted, "Even after we resolved whatever problem we were dealing with, we still weren't finished firefighting. The resulting post-mortem analysis could take as long as a day. That's why we decided to go out to the market and evaluate application performance management solutions."

Benefits Received from AppDynamics
Karavel self-deployed AppDynamics in its production environment without having to rely upon any experts from AppDynamics. Upon doing so, the Karavel team immediately identified a production performance bottleneck, thanks to AppDynamics' ability to auto-discover and display full call stack latency breakdown for problematic business transactions. Karavel also used AppDynamics to find and resolve a performance problem created by a new build. With AppDynamics, Karavel believes its Mean-time-to-Resolution has been reduced from three hours down to a matter of minutes.

Karavel's team continues to reap the benefits of choosing AppDynamics. Mr. Postaire said, "AppDynamics is now used by around fifty people that include business analysts, developers, architects and operations, but it's so easy to use that no one needs to 'own' it. Business, Ops, Dev, and the Architecture team simply use the solution as needed. And the results have been tremendous: we've seen a 20% increase in performance across many of our key transactions."

"Root cause analysis has became much faster and far less painful compared to our previous practice of analyzing log files and thread dumps," Mr. Postaire said. "AppDynamics is easy to use and delivers fantastic value for my entire team."

Companies with similar needs to Karavel, who want to leverage Java performance monitoring and have applications built on open-source middleware like tomcat and JBoss, can start by downloading AppDynamics Lite for free jboss monitoring, tomcat monitoring, weblogic monitoring, websphere monitoring, and glassfish monitoring.