Betting on Dynatrace at Racing and Wagering Western Australia

Accelerating to the cloud

The adoption of cloud introduced a full suite of benefits, but also new layers of complexities. To be able to accelerate their cloud migration strategy, RWWA needed to break down existing silos and increase collaboration between operations and development teams. In addition, there was a plethora of tools across its operational landscape, but none providing a single view of the entire technology stack, making it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of faults and remediate issues quickly.

It was clear that RWWA required a much greater degree of visibility in the operational behaviours of its systems, particularly as the workloads were moving to the cloud. Being able to understand the existing behaviour of applications before migration would allow them to accurately plan and optimize their cloud native architectures, whilst ensuring that post cloud migration performance was in line with its service level requirements.

Out-of-the-box value

Given the number of disparate tools in the organization, with no single reference point for application performance and traceability, RWWA investigated several commercial solutions but it was clear that not all could fully support their requirements.

“Dynatrace was the only solution that worked straight out of the box. We evaluated other tools, but it was very quickly proven that they just couldn’t support our stack and it would take months of configuration and custom instrumentation. Dynatrace was installed within a day and we immediately saw value, with a number of issues identified that needed to be addressed, including one in a high value channel that was impacting performance for customers,” explains Grey Properjohn, Head of Software Engineering and Architecture, Racing and Wagering Western Australia.

The decision to adopt Dynatrace was also driven by its ability to improve customer value and customer experience. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Dynatrace provides RWWA a greater understanding of transactional performance in real-time and pinpoint the root cause of issues.

“Through the ability to monitor our digital channels from the client all the way down our stack, we’ve been able to gain insights into how customers engage with the platform, and then understand how to respond proactively to improve the customer experience,” Properjohn says.

Life with Dynatrace

• Root-cause identification powered by AI  – With real-time observability across all channels, Dynatrace AI enabled RWWA to detect problems in real-time and pinpoint the root cause immediately.
• Significant time saved in performance testing  – The scale at which RWWA operates means system performance is critical. Before Dynatrace, each performance test run took up to four days to compile a detailed analysis, severely limiting the cadence of testing. Now, with Dynatrace, this analysis is performed in real time and with these tests now integrated into their CI/CD pipelines, they’ve never been able to gain insights as quickly as they can now.
• Adding value to cloud investment and accelerating migration  – The cloud migration and AWS platform teams use Dynatrace constantly to gain side-by-side comparison analysis and get objective measurements.