Motorpoint drives frictionless omnichannel buying journeys with Dynatrace

Motorpoint is an omnichannel business, putting customers in the driving seat by enabling them to choose how and where they shop for their next car. Customers can begin their car buying journey online, in store, or even by phone, switching between channels at any stage. To support this, Motorpoint relies on an ecommerce platform that allows customers to browse, reserve, and finance their next car in just a few clicks. It’s critical that car buyers can transact 24/7 and in-store sales teams aren’t interrupted by problems in the application stack – meaning the resilience and security of the platform is critical.

The event-driven nature of the retail industry means Motorpoint’s ecommerce platform is subjected to spikes in users at peak times, such as at weekends or after its advert has been shown on television. It relies on scaling its infrastructure up and down to maintain resilience during these spikes and avoid overspending at normal times. To enable this, Motorpoint migrated its applications to an event-driven microservices architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS). As part of the migration, Motorpoint needed to ensure its engineering and operations team can identify and resolve user-impacting issues quickly.

Observability was critical to Motorpoint’s ability to create frictionless omnichannel journeys for its customers. After considering the potential solutions, Motorpoint selected Dynatrace for its automated approach and ability to provide real-time visibility into every layer of its hybrid cloud environment.

“Dynatrace is essential as we continue adopting new technologies and moving to the cloud,” said Neil Gaskell, Head of Engineering and Operations at Motorpoint. “What really differentiates Dynatrace is its speed and ease of use. We needed a solution that enabled us to understand how our platforms’ new capabilities are performing as we’re building them, and make sure they work the same way in the wild. From day one, Dynatrace provided instant value, enabling our engineers to understand our platforms in ways we didn’t think were possible. Without the visibility Dynatrace provides, we wouldn’t be able to innovate as quickly.”

• Faster innovation: The AI-powered observability offered by Dynatrace has reduced the time that Motorpoint’s engineering and operations teams spend triaging issues by around 90%. Helping to resolve problems quickly, before users are impacted, and focus more of their time on innovation rather than troubleshooting.
• Instant visibility: Dynatrace automatically begins to monitor everything Motorpoint deploys in production, even if the application hasn’t been seen before. Within minutes, Dynatrace starts to surface insights and instantly alerts the team to any problems. This capability has helped accelerate Motorpoint’s cloud migration, by giving its teams the confidence to deploy applications in the cloud with reduced risk.
• Proactive servicing: With the real-time insights from Dynatrace, Motorpoint doesn’t need to wait for users to report problems, because it’s alerted first. This puts Motorpoint on the front foot, enabling the team to acknowledge the problem and give its users confidence that it will be resolved quickly when they contact customer services.
• Improved security: Dynatrace Application Security is creating further value by quickly alerting Motorpoint to any vulnerabilities in third-party code and software in its platform so it can hold service providers accountable and ensure they are quickly resolved. Without Dynatrace, it would need to rely on periodic scans that raise too many false positives or simply trust its vendors to deliver secure software. As a result, Motorpoint can continue to strengthen the security of its platform, which is essential as it works towards its Cyber Essentials Certification.

“Dynatrace helps my team build trust between technology and the business, because it tells us when something is wrong, before anybody has even noticed,” continued Gaskell. “That gives us the ability to say – ‘we know about that, and we’re on it’ – which allows the business to relax, because they can see we have a handle on the situation. We can only do that with Dynatrace. It’s a 24-hour colleague that tells us the moment that something looks wrong, so we don’t have to sit there watching everything.”