Vivint leads the way in smart home technology with Dynatrace

A customer-centric business

Vivint is a smart home and automation company that prides itself on putting customer experience at the heart of its drive to help families to live safer, and better lives, driven by automation. Its technology is tightly integrated into the lives of millions of people, helping them to protect their homes and families. Any outage could result in risk to their safety leading to the potential loss of customers and brand reputation, so the technology must be flawless and work every time. With change as the only constant in a fast-paced world, Vivint needed to accelerate the speed of innovation across its business, to keep their competitive edge, by bringing new features to market faster, without compromising the customer experience.

To enable this, Vivint needed to enhance observability across its technology and software ecosystem, so they could have complete visibility, as innovations introduce new components. This would be crucial to enabling Vivint to understand how its customers were interacting with its products and what the experience was like for them, so its teams could identify where they needed to make improvements. Its monitoring solution was unable to provide the depth of visibility that teams needed, or the answers to understand the root cause of problems that were impacting the customer experience in a timely manner.

A smarter approach

Vivint needed a more automated, intelligent solution that could help them gain continuous insights so they can innovate faster and address any issues before they adversely impacted their customers. The new solution should be able to work across its hybrid environment – cloud platforms and legacy data centers and help quickly pinpoint root cause of issues so Vivint teams can resolve them fast. Following a detailed review of the observability market, it identified Dynatrace as the best fit for its needs.

“We looked at everything in the market and did POCs with about 20 different solutions. Dynatrace was the one platform that combined everything we were looking for,” said Mike Cabrera, Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Vivint. “One of the strengths of Dynatrace is it’s easy to use, so you can start immediately. It helped us instrument our applications and easily understand who was using them and why, and how they were interacting with them. That combination is incredibly powerful – there’s nothing else in the industry that compares.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Confident, faster innovation: Dynatrace’s full stack observability and advanced automation enabled Vivint to maintain its competitive differentiation by innovating at the speed of the market with greater confidence. Teams can see the impact of any changes they make in real time, with visibility from the code level right the way through to the end user. If problems arise, they can act quickly to protect customer experience.
• Smarter operations: The precise answers from Dynatrace have changed the way that Vivint’s teams work. Previously, its production operations teams spent 90% of their time firefighting issues. Now, they spend that time proactively optimizing its software to bring better products to market helping them stay ahead.
• Improved productivity: As a result of the reduced time spent reacting to problems, developers now have more time to focus on proactively improving services for its customers. This has enabled a 2x increase in the amount of innovation that Vivint’s engineering teams can deliver to the business and its customers each month.
• Greater customer happiness and satisfaction: The precise answers from Dynatrace have really lit up the customer experience for Vivint, helping its teams to build better products faster. The developer experience has also seen a significant benefit, as teams have better insights into how their code is functioning as they’re producing it. As a result, Vivint has not only seen developer productivity and satisfaction rise, but has also recorded a corresponding increase in customer satisfaction of around 15%.

“Dynatrace was a game changer for us,” continued Cabrera. “It bridged a gap between our technology and the people who use it. That helped us really understand our services and deliver a better experience to our users. That’s incredibly powerful, because we only care about our customers, so what we do all day is just trying to deliver a better experience and tighten our feedback loops. That’s where Dynatrace comes in. It enabled observability, but it also enabled us to look at what was happening deep in our infrastructure, which is something we didn’t have before.”