dynaTrace overcomes Mission Impossible

Solothurn – November 2007

The changeover from one software solution to another is similar to Mission Impossible in many cases. Only long-term and thorough planning in all areas from software tests to the training of the employees can guarantee successful migration. However, even with the best planning time is short if unexpected problems arise. Centris AG experienced this problem together with their strategic partners CSC Switzerland GmbH, Adcubum AG and their technology partner HP when introducing the Swiss Health Platform (SHP): the search for the causes of performance problems often took many days. This was turned around by implementing the diagnostics software “dynaTrace Diagnostics”.

The Centris AG project team used dynaTrace Diagnostics for the first time for the rollout of the Swiss Health Platform for the migration from IRIS to SYRIUS ASE. Insurance software SYRIUS ASE was initially introduced at the beginning of September by Xundheit, the Swiss public health fund in Luzern. Syrius showed performance weaknesses under load which were not visible in test. “We would have gone live with Syrius but without dynaTrace Diagnostics it would not have gone so smoothly from the beginning,” according to Vera Gawlick, Project Manager for IT system technology at Centris AG. “While before we just could guess based on the problem's symptoms where the real issues were, dynaTrace Diagnostics pointed out exactly where we needed to re-adjust,” Gawlick reported. “Subsequently we were able to discover and improve many things which we would not have considered before, within four weeks before the go-live.”

Vera Gawlick named the “partner search”, which could be improved from 3 to 0.3 seconds, as just one example. In a further 30 cases dynaTrace Diagnostics highlighted inefficient database statements and reduced the transaction time by 90 percent in all cases. The memory requirements of the Java VM were reduced drastically by tuning with dynaTrace Diagnostics. The analyses showed that too many sessions were staying open for days. With memory usage of between 40 and 50 MB per session “out of memory” problems and “garbage collector thrashing” could be easily predicted and thus resolved in good time before the start of production.

At Xundheit a total of 140 users access two UTC server and two BEA Weblogic servers which lead to around 16,000 requests per day. Using dynaTrace Diagnostics Centris AG can calculate exact statistics and decide precisely which bottlenecks are caused by the infrastructure (database, network, etc.) and which are caused by the application. On account of these findings Centris AG has founded a task force for performance analysis with software suppliers. Thanks to dynaTrace Diagnostics all participants are now speaking the same language and can reduce the lead times of data-intensive and regular batch jobs by up to 90%. “dynaTrace Diagnostics offers very important insights particularly with the diagnostics of batch jobs due to its efficient database and exception diagnostics,” the project leader reported. “As a result the communication with software suppliers has been clearly improved which subsequently has a positive effect on the communication with our customer Xundheit.”

The software SYRIUS ASE was developed with comprehensive back and front office applications for different insurance divisions by Adcubum AG, whose headquarters are in St. Gallen. The version 1.0 was implemented at Xundheit. During the beta tests in the summer Gawlick and her team used different monitoring and load test tools without coming up with any satisfactory results. A proof of concept with dynaTrace Diagnostics finally shed some light onto many unsolved questions. “The dynaTrace employees advised us really well so that we were able to reveal problems that we had not even considered before”, Gawlick said referring to the competence and the service quality of dynaTrace. Following the proof of concept the decision was clear for Centris that the rollout of SYRIUS ASE would continue with the help of dynaTrace Diagnostics. As a result dynaTrace was able penetrate the market in Switzerland ahead of large international players for the first time.

dynaTrace is being used as a 24/7 monitoring tool in order to recognise, understand and solve any performance bottlenecks quickly in the Centris production environment. In the coming years Centris AG will rollout the SYRIUS ASE software at a further ten insurances. The next rollout, however, will already be with release 2 which offers several enhancements. In order to be able to carry out rollouts in the future much better and more efficiently, Gawlick recommends that her strategic partners also use dynaTrace Diagnositcs intensively: “I am convinced that dynaTrace Diagnostics is an ideal tool for all developers for the early diagnostics of the effects of all improvements in new releases.”

Learn more about dynaTrace Diagnostics.

About Centris AG

Centris AG is a leading service provider for modular IT solutions for Swiss health and accident insurers and with around 150 employees is one of the biggest employers in the town of Solothurn. Centris administers the data of 1.7 M insurants for 18 health and accident insurances including SWICA, Intras, Innova, Aquilana, Xundheit, Assura, Allianz, die Schweizerische Mobiliar and other well-known health and accident insurances. Centris is the market leader in the area of electronic auditing and tariff management in Switzerland. The improvement of the core application with the introduction of the Swiss Health Platform is the largest development leap within the 60 years history of the company – and one of the most important succeses of the Swiss IT service industry this year. In 2006 the company had a turnover of 47 M CHF. http://www.centrisag.ch/

About dynaTrace software Inc.

dynaTrace is the leader in application performance diagnostics for business-critical Java and .NET applications. dynaTrace’s technology is the only solution that can trace a specific transaction path across multiple physical tiers and servers enabling customers to move beyond monitoring to take action. In each application lifecycle stage – development, QA, staging, live operation – IT personnel now can see and understand where and why performance bottlenecks exist. With dynaTrace Diagnostics, enterprises gain better understanding of their applications’ dynamic behavior, allowing them to reconstruct problems quickly, identify their root-cause and fix it.

Monitor. Diagnose. Resolve.

Contacts:
dynaTrace Software Inc.
Eric Senunas, +17814668082

or
Klaus Fellner, +4373290820832