Enhancing User Experience of Business-Critical Applications via an Observability solution for a Global Real Estate Agency and Consultancy Firm

Overview

The client, a Global Real Estate Agency and Consultancy Firm operating 50+ countries globally, and managing real estate worth $800 Billion, was facing performance degradation in their business-critical applications used by residential and commercial real estate agents and end clients. This was impacting the end-client experience, leading to end clients switching to competition. Microland deployed its Intelligeni Observe platform to integrate with client monitoring tools and build dependency models to bring observability capabilities for faster issue detection and diagnostics.

About Client

The client is a global real estate consultancy and estate agency headquartered in London, UK with over 600+ offices across 50+ countries globally. With its workforce of over 20,000 employees, the client manages commercial, residential, and agricultural real estate worth more than $800 Billion.

Business Challenges

The client being a Global Real Estate Agency and Consulting firm, relies heavily on business-critical applications both internal applications used by residential and commercial real estate agents and those on the company website used by end clients and internal real estate agents. Any degradation in performance and availability of these business applications is critical for the client, as end clients can switch to competition if the user experience is poor. The website had multiple instances to serve customers in different countries.

The client had set up multiple monitoring tools. However, the observability capabilities to monitor the performance of business-critical applications were limited, leading to delayed detection and resolution of issues and incidents. Most of the incidents/issues were identified from complaints and tickets raised by business users and external end clients. Frequently, there was partial degradation where an instance serving users in a particular country was facing performance degradation.

Our Solution

The client operates in a highly competitive real estate market, and its business operations heavily rely on the end-client-facing web applications and internal applications leveraged by commercial and residential real estate agents. This makes it critical for business applications to have high availability, performance, and reliability for uninterrupted business operations and customer experience.

1. The Microland team conducted workshops with the business applications team to understand the challenges and requirements of the team and implement specific customizations in Intelligeni Observe to address them. This comprised of modeling dependencies of application components and infrastructure components. In addition, user experience for different instances of the applications was modeled.
2. The Microland team set up the Azure Application Insights tool and set up relevant alert policies. Existing policies in the Azure Monitor tool for the infrastructure were analyzed and additional alert policies were set to plug the gaps in the monitoring. Alert policies included availability, performance of the applications along with user experience monitoring of all the application instances.
3. Intelligeni Observe was integrated with infrastructure and application monitoring tools - SolarWinds, Azure Monitor, and Azure Application Insights for traces. Intelligeni Observe was also integrated and correlated across different sources and relating infra metrics with application traces assisting in reduced mean time to diagnosis.
4. With the observability coverage increased, incident detection and diagnostics were faster leading to reduced performance degradation.

Value Delivered

1. 60% Reduction in Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): Integration of monitoring tools with Intelligeni Observe and correlation of alerts from multiple monitoring tools in Intelligeni Observe leading to faster detection and diagnosis.
2. 50% Reduction in incidents: Increased coverage of observability leading to early issue detection through performance degradation and incident prevention.
3. 30% Reduction in Mean Time to Response (MTTR): Integrating Intelligeni Observe with infra and apps monitoring tools, implementing dependency models between apps and infra components, and alerts correlation and clustering leading to faster diagnosis and response to incidents.