State of Minnesota ensures uninterrupted access to unemployment insurance application with Dynatrace

Delivering essential services in times of crisis

The State of Minnesota is the government body that provides support for Minnesotan citizens. Its IT services team (MNIT) manages the critical applications and infrastructure that enable citizens to access essential government services online. These include the Department of Employment and Economic Development and Unemployment Insurance application, which experienced a tenfold surge in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The application’s average monthly traffic volume of 638,000 visitors peaked at 6.6 million during the pandemic last year. This demand remained steady, with online visits to the application averaging above two million per month in 2021. Due to the critical nature of these services, the State of Minnesota faced significant pressure to ensure citizens had uninterrupted access. However, limited resources and a reliance on manual processes meant the MNIT team was operating in a reactive way, spending hours in war rooms chasing down problems, which made it difficult to optimize services effectively.

Automatic and intelligent observability transforms operations

The State of Minnesota realized it needed a new approach to maintaining visibility and control over the stability and performance of its applications. The department selected Dynatrace due to its automatic and intelligent observability capabilities, which provided the insights the MNIT team needed to optimize the performance of critical applications and handle rapid surges in demand. Dynatrace has also helped reduce manual processes and eliminated the need for war rooms to identify the cause of problems. As a result, the MNIT team now has the time to prioritize innovation and focus on developing new services for citizens.

“Our mission is to deliver secure, reliable digital solutions to improve the lives of all Minnesotans,” said Kailey Smith, Application Architect, State of Minnesota IT Services. “By eliminating the need for manual processes and guesswork, Dynatrace has enabled us to transition from a team that’s been historically reactive, to one that’s consistently proactive. We no longer waste hours in war rooms chasing down problems and are rededicating this time to develop and deliver new services for our citizens, faster and more efficiently than ever before.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Ensuring uninterrupted access – Precise answers from Dynatrace have helped the MNIT team continually assess and optimize the configuration of the infrastructure and code underpinning its critical applications. This ensures it can support the ongoing demand for its services.
• Improving user experiences – With Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability, the MNIT team can combine real-time visibility across its digital ecosystem with AIOps capabilities to ensure reliable performance of critical services. Since adopting Dynatrace, the State of Minnesota has achieved a reduction in significant IT issues and performance degradations.
• Driving innovation – By automatically identifying anomalies, pinpointing the root-cause of issues, and alerting when problems with true business impact occur, Dynatrace enabled the MNIT team to reduce manual effort and focus on driving innovation, without risking the performance of existing services.
• Accelerating transformation – The State of Minnesota is also using insights from Dynatrace to support the next stage of its digital transformation. This includes migrating applications and databases to AWS to provide greater scalability and stability, and further optimizing them with cloud native architectures.

“Dynatrace’s AIOps gives our team the confidence to pursue innovation and automation more aggressively, and roll out changes to critical applications faster, without increased risk,” continued Smith. “With Dynatrace, our team can now quickly assess the impact of updates and new features and resolve issues before users are ever impacted. This helps ensure our digital services are always available to those who need them, regardless of how demand fluctuates. As a result, we’ve consistently been one of the first states to update our application to support rapid policy changes around benefit payments during the pandemic.”