Western Governors University enhances the student experience and accelerates incident resolution with Dynatrace

Western Governors University (WGU) is experiencing rapid growth, with student enrollment increasing by 20% year over year. As both the student body and the supporting staff expand, the university’s digital ecosystem has grown in parallel. Every application, integration, and backend system plays a role in supporting students who invest significant time and income into their education. WGU’s goal is to ensure that every touchpoint along the student journey enables success, from onboarding through to graduation, and even encourages learners to return for a second degree.

However, such rapid expansion created significant operational complexity. WGU needed better visibility to enable its teams to manage its growing technology landscape effectively. The university had implemented an application performance monitoring tool, but it lacked the fine-layered reporting, data, and dashboards needed to fully understand where problems were occurring.

To overcome visibility gap, WGU needed an observability platform that could pinpoint the precise cause of issues across its stack and provide the actionable insight its teams needed to optimize the student experience. It selected Dynatrace due to its ability to offer real-time observability into systems performance and availability as its environment continues to scale. These insights enabled teams to focus on delivering more reliable student services rather than managing complex tooling.

“There’s a lot to love about Dynatrace,” said Angel Marchena, Director of Technical Operations, Western Governors University. “It’s an incredible platform, but the biggest benefit is our ability to deploy it and manage it so easily. With other telemetry platforms, you gained something and lost something. Dynatrace didn’t compromise. It provided the fastest time to insight, with a high level of visibility through a single platform.”

Faster recovery

With precise telemetry and business insight, WGU can now focus directly on optimizing the services that have the greatest impact on the student experience. Instead of searching across systems, teams can pinpoint failures immediately and understand how they relate to user interactions. This has reduced resolution times from several days to just hours.

Building on this foundation, WGU has extended its capabilities with the AWS DevOps Agent, integrated natively with Dynatrace. Dynatrace Intelligence automatically routes detected problems to the Agent, which performs deep, automated investigations and returns enriched findings directly into Dynatrace.

In a recent production incident, WGU’s SRE team used the DevOps Agent to analyze a service disruption and reduce resolution time from an estimated two hours to just 28 minutes—a 77% improvement. The Agent rapidly identified the root cause within a misconfigured AWS Lambda function and surfaced critical operational knowledge that had previously been buried in internal documentation. This level of automated insight dramatically accelerates mean time to resolution while reducing reliance on tribal knowledge.

Higher student satisfaction

By capturing business events, WGU gains detailed visibility into how students interact with its services. Rather than relying on internal testing assumptions, teams can see real user behavior and identify friction points across digital learning journeys. These insights provide a wealth of knowledge that informs mitigation strategies and product improvements, helping ensure each touchpoint contributes to a successful student experience.

Improved cloud-native visibility

Dynatrace enables WGU to gain a holistic, real-time view of workloads across its AWS environment. Rather than switching between native cloud tools, teams access unified telemetry, topology, and logs in one platform. Dynatrace is embedded in CI/CD pipelines for all AWS deployments to ensure they are observable by default. Integrated log management, combined with DevOps Agent capabilities, enables faster, AI-assisted investigation and more consistent operational outcomes.

More reliable innovation

WGU has ambitious goals to embed AI into IT operations, aiming for autonomous agents to resolve issues or provide clear remediation guidance before human intervention. The DevOps Agent represents a key step toward this vision, augmenting engineering teams with intelligent automation that accelerates discovery and decision-making.

Dynatrace will play a critical role in this future with real-time assessment of application performance and support for automated resolution. As AI becomes more embedded in WGU’s operations, Dynatrace will be the foundation for success, by monitoring its autonomous agents and alerting teams if their behavior deviates or risks escalate.

“Dynatrace has become our go-to solution to investigate any type of application issue,” said Nate Cummings, Senior Director of Infrastructure, Western Governors University. “When a major incident takes place, we immediately pull up Dynatrace to see which application is at fault and which systems are connected to it. Dynatrace not only identifies what’s not performing as it should but helps us solve the problem at a much faster rate. Dynatrace is critical to our success and to delivering the reliable experience our students expect.”