National Grid reduces observability TCO by 18% through migrating from Dynatrace Managed to SaaS

National Grid is pursuing a digital transformation strategy to improve visibility over its energy network and enhance the experience of its customers. To enable this strategy, National Grid has embraced a hybrid, multicloud technology stack to power its hundreds of thousands of applications across multiple business lines – including its main customer touchpoint, the Unified Web Portal. This technology stack spans everything from on-premises data centers to Microsoft Azure, and Kubernetes clusters running on Red Hat OpenShift. Over time, however, National Grid’s sheer range of services and platforms made it increasingly difficult to monitor and manage the user experience. This created an unacceptable risk for National Grid, since even 15 minutes of downtime can impact millions of customers across the UK and US looking to access billing or support services.

To overcome this challenge and maintain end-to-end visibility over its hybrid, multicloud technology stack, National Grid turned to Dynatrace’s unified observability and security platform. Dynatrace stood out for its ability to provide a single view into all National Grid’s services, and its AI-powered insights with rapid root cause analysis, giving National Grid the precise answers that its teams needed to understand and resolve any issues before customers were impacted. Initially, National Grid adopted a dual deployment model, using Dynatrace Managed for on-premises back-end monitoring, and its SaaS platform running on AWS for a smaller set of front-end applications.

National Grid was keenly aware of the benefits of SaaS deployment models, including more frequent updates, faster access to new features, the absence of maintenance costs, and reduced need for support teams. To maximize the value that Dynatrace brought, National Grid wanted to scale the SaaS platform to replace its use of the on-premises solution. The operations team was able to overcome the security team’s initial concerns around scaling Dynatrace SaaS to more sensitive use cases, due to the platform’s certifications, extensive data masking and encryption capabilities, alongside features such as auto-logouts for inactivity, data checklists, and multifactor authentication. Once these concerns were addressed, National Grid proceeded with the migration, which was completed within just six months.

“Migrating to Dynatrace SaaS has helped us reduce the total cost of ownership of our observability capabilities,” said Paul Miller, AIOps & Observability Product Manager, National Grid. “We’ve also been delighted by how Dynatrace SaaS has made it easier for us to collaborate with third parties like our vendors and partners. We can now offer our partners access to the real-time observability data in Dynatrace in a secure and controlled way, allowing them to better understand how their apps are performing. This enables us to move faster and saves a lot of time that we all used to waste on finger-pointing and back-and-forth exchanges to resolve issues. Dynatrace SaaS has allowed us and our partners to all benefit from the precise answers and intelligent automation of the Dynatrace platform and use it to optimize experiences for our customers.”

• Reduced operational costs: By migrating from Dynatrace Managed to its SaaS platform, National Grid achieved significant cost and time savings, due to the absence of server maintenance and support requirements. Dynatrace SaaS eliminated the need for National Grid to maintain two separate instances of Dynatrace Managed in the UK and US markets.
• Secure and efficient third-party collaboration: With Dynatrace SaaS, third-party technology partners, service providers, and vendors can now review National Grid’s observability data in real-time, with out-of-the-box access controls that safeguard privacy and governance. This has established a shared source of truth with third parties around issues impacting National Grid’s applications and services. As a result, both National Grid and its partners can collaborate more effectively, and quickly resolve complex problems to prevent any adverse impact on customer experiences.
  
• Outstanding customer experiences: Dynatrace SaaS breaks down silos throughout National Grid’s complex technology stack, enabling rapid analyses at scale to proactively prevent issues before they affect end users – across both internal and third-party systems. As a result, National Grid’s teams have seen their mean time to resolve (MTTR) improve by more than 50%.
  
• More time for innovation: Adopting Dynatrace SaaS has removed the need for National Grid’s teams to spend time maintaining, configuring, and patching their observability solution. Instead, this engineering talent is devoted to delivering innovation elsewhere across National Grid, and exploring new functionality that Dynatrace offers to help execute its digital transformation strategy.