Dubai Customs optimizes Mirsal Performance and enhances customer experience with Dynatrace

Keeping the wheels of commerce moving

Dubai Customs continues to transform its services to provide smart platforms that help drive a thriving online business in the UAE. Key to this is Mirsal, a collection of mission-critical applications used to process the movement of goods in and out of the emirate. Any failure in these applications can lead to long delays and tailbacks at the border, potentially causing commodities with a limited shelf-life to spoil. Maximizing uptime is therefore vital to ensure clearance processes are fast and meet the high standards its customers expect. Dubai Customs also aspires to being able to contact customers proactively to help them complete transactions if they encounter a problem.

To manage the performance and availability of its digital services, Dubai Customs previously relied on a variety of legacy monitoring solutions. Many of these solutions were native to its infrastructure, which spans traditional data center and private cloud environments. Development teams also used their own preferred testing tools to ensure any new builds met the required standards before being released to production. This fragmented approach resulted in delays to innovation and performance blind spots, which meant Dubai Customs was often unaware of problems until customers reported them.

Automatic discovery and precise answers

Dubai Customs needed end-to-end, real-time observability across its applications and infrastructure to improve the reliability of its services and help teams resolve issues before they impacted customers. After evaluating the market, Dubai Customs identified Dynatrace as the best solution for its needs. It saw particular benefits in Dynatrace’s ability to automatically capture every user transaction, rather than relying on random sampling to baseline performance. This offered Dubai Customs visibility into every user journey and precise, AI-powered answers into the impact of any performance problems on their experience. These insights would enable its teams to instantly identify the precise root cause of problems and prioritize their efforts to resolve those with the most significant impact on its customers.

“Dynatrace was the obvious choice due to its comprehensive range of capabilities and the depth and breadth of observability it provided at infrastructure level in a single solution,” says Mushtaq Khan, Infrastructure Team Lead at Dubai Customs. “Dynatrace gave us an end-to-end view across our hyper converged infrastructure environment within seconds, without needing multiple agents or plugins. Its fully automated continuous discovery eliminated blind spots and meant we no longer had to rely on sampling or estimate the impact application performance has on our user experience.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Streamlined performance testing – Previously, teams had to run different tests to evaluate the performance of each layer of the technology stack, which was complex and time-consuming to manage. With Dynatrace’s full stack monitoring capabilities, teams can run all tests with a single solution when promoting new code to production. This has reduced the number of tests its teams need to conduct for each new release from approximately 30, to just three.
• Faster and higher quality releases – Dynatrace has dramatically accelerated Dubai Customs’ time-to-market for new digital services and application updates, speeding up its release cycle by approximately 70%. Its development teams have been able to ‘shift-left’ by using Dynatrace to identify and eliminate bugs in pre-production, resulting in higher quality releases.
• Enhanced customer service – Dynatrace’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) module enables Dubai Customs to be more proactive in ensuring a smooth customer experience. Previously, if a customer experienced a problem, the system would generate a tracking number for them to report to customer services. With Dynatrace, Dubai Customs can capture that number on the backend, identify the user, and create a dashboard to provide its customer service team with all the insights they need to understand the problem. In the future, its goal is to enable service teams to use these insights to proactively reach out to customers and resolve issues for them faster.
• Customized observability – Dubai Customs is using the open and extensible nature of Dynatrace to capture custom metrics. This enables it to put more data about the outcomes that matter most to its business into actionable context. Previously, its teams only had access to insights for the previous day, which quickly become redundant in a fast-moving organization. Dynatrace gives teams real time, actionable data and more precise answers that enable them to make more effective decisions.

“Dynatrace has completely transformed the way we operate as an organization,” said Imran Jamadar, Technical Champion at Dubai Customs. “The precise answers from Dynatrace enable us to maintain a fast clearance process and meet the strict SLAs we use to ensure we meet our customers’ expectations. We can now identify and resolve issues immediately and no longer have to wait for customers to tell us if there’s a problem. Since adopting Dynatrace, we have scored 91.8 percent on the Customer Happiness Index and become one of the top three entities in all Dubai Government departments. We are always striving to uphold our standards and raise the bar, and Dynatrace is essential in helping us achieve that goal.”