BARBRI raises the bar for remote learning experiences with Dynatrace

Cloud migration obscures visibility

In recent years, e-learning has continued to grow in popularity, as students have demanded a more flexible education model that allows them to learn from anywhere, at any time, to suit their busy lives. BARBRI has a longstanding history of improving learning techniques through innovation, and has been quick to respond to the growing demand for online courses. To support this, it has migrated many of its applications to the cloud and embraced microservices to increase agility and accelerate innovation.

However, BARBRI’s hybrid, cloud-native technology stack introduced complexity and made it harder to maintain the observability needed to effectively manage student learning journeys. The BARBRI IT team realized that this would be incredibly difficult to manage using traditional monitoring solutions and APM tools, which required significant manual effort to deploy and maintain. The ability to offer seamless learning journeys is central to BARBRI’s success, so the team quickly identified the need for a solution that was easy to deploy and offered the full-stack observability required.

Deeper insight into learning journeys

The BARBRI team identified Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs. Members were particularly impressed by how easily Dynatrace could be deployed, and its ability to provide all the information needed to understand the impact of performance on user experience in a single view. Dynatrace’s Digital Business Analytics and Digital Experience Management modules also offered significant value through richer and deeper insight into how students engaged with online learning resources.

“I see Dynatrace as a revenue-generating solution, as it provides the data that drives our business forward. Our students’ learning experience is the lifeblood of our business, and their success accessing and navigating our e-learning resources directly influences our bottom line. Before Dynatrace, we would often learn of issues for the first time from our students, but with Dynatrace’s AI engine continuously watching for anomalies, we discover and address issues before students are impacted. Dynatrace has transformed the way we work, allowing us to switch from reacting to problems to proactively optimizing student journeys,” said Mark Kaplan, Senior Director of IT, BARBRI.

Life with Dynatrace

• AI-powered answers – The precise answers provided by Dynatrace’s AI engine offer deeper insight into how the performance of BARBRI’s applications and infrastructure, as well as its training content and user interface, impact students’ learning journeys and affect business outcomes. As a result, operations, development and business teams collaborate more closely, resolving 99% of issues before they impact students, and are able to focus their efforts on proactively improving e-learning experiences to increase business momentum.
• Full-stack observability – Dynatrace is becoming even more crucial as BARBRI continues to transition more of its services to a cloud-native architecture. Dynatrace’s Infrastructure Monitoring module offers the full stack observability BARBRI needs to manage performance issues and anomalies across Kubernetes clusters, containers, and workloads, to ensure it can overcome complexity and continue to raise the bar in e-learning experiences for law students.
• Deeper business insights – Dynatrace’s Digital Business Analytics module enables BARBRI to understand which learning resources its students are using most, which tests they frequently struggle with, and where they most often experience site-navigation difficulties. These insights enable developers to build more compelling e-learning experiences and help business leaders to track company performance on core KPIs. It also helps BARBRI identify opportunities to enhance student satisfaction and further grow the business.

“Dynatrace enables us to experience our students’ journeys first-hand, so we can reach out to them and guide them through a task if they’re struggling. That enables us to fine-tune user experiences in ways that have never been possible before, and has revolutionized the way that we interact with our students, to build stronger relationships and continually advance our company. Dynatrace is a real-life ‘wow factor’, giving us everything we need to ensure our students are happy and everything is running as it should,” Kaplan concluded.