Oceanwide started its AppDynamics journey three years ago and relies heavily on it for its investigations of critical issues. Its usage—a mix of proactive alerting and reactive usage—has allowed Oceanwide to reach high standards of availability. Striving to adopt a DevOps culture, the broader adoption of AppDynamics across the company is a key focus. In this session, we will discuss how to work with developers and QA staff in their adoption of AppDynamics as well as key initiatives that enable them to use the solution as a common language when interacting with the operations team. Key takeaways: o How to promote and nurture the adoption of AppDynamics in developer and QA scrums o Key elements of a successful DevOps cell built around AppDynamics o How to establish AppDynamics as the common language between development, QA, and operations For more information go to: www.appdynamics.com”

1. How Oceanwide accelerated its DevOps
adoption journey with AppDynamics
Vincent Lamonde
Applications Architect | Oceanwide

2. A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME
Software engineering graduate
• 12 years of experience with .Net applications
• Various roles : developer lead, architect, performance engineer
Applications architect @ Oceanwide
• Architect the integration of Oceanwide products and 3rd party
applications on our internal cloud
• Lead of the DevOps initiative
Performance driven
• Expertise in software & environment performance optimization
• Strive for optimal usage of resources through continuous monitoring

3. OCEANWIDE
Who are we?
• Leader in the property & casualty insurance software market
• Deep SaaS insurance industry expertise
• Founded in 1996, acquired by Insurity in 2015
• Offices in Canada, USA and England
• 200+ employees
Our products
• Genoa – launched in 2000
• Premier global marine insurance platform
• Multi-tenant
• Bridge – launched in 2011
• Integrated insurance suite for any line
• Modular solution (Policy, Claims, Billing, etc)
• Fully configurable by end users

4. 4
The building blocks
• DevOps @ Oceanwide
• Bridge & Genoa through AppDynamics
• The early days of AppDynamics at Oceanwide
Turning the tide
• All hands on deck
• The triggers & objectives
• Establishing the language
A success story – the Bridge performance team
• The early adopters of the AppDynamics solution
• Starting the grass root effect

5. THE BUILDING
BLOCKS
5

6. WHAT IS DEVOPS? What is DevOps?
• Set of guidelines and principles
• Relies heavily on automation & a collaborative culture
Hard to establish a single definition
• Everyone has their own
• By nature is a concept that each
organization has to adapt to its reality
Some key concepts must remain
• Automation of software
delivery
• Infrastructure as code
• Building teams around
products, not expertise
• Increased collaboration
between Dev and Ops

7. DEVOPS @ OCEANWIDE – THE INITIATIVE
2016 – The year of DevOps
• Much needed initiative and culture change
• Ops : private and public clouds, scalability and availability
• Dev : increasing pace, micro services architecture
The DevOps initiative – a cultural change
• Built around 4 main pillars:
• collaboration,
• communication,
• integration,
• automation
• Sponsored by senior management
• Spearheaded by a group of subject
matter experts

8. DEVOPS @ OCEANWIDE - THE PROJECTS
Culture shift realized through various types of projects
• Technical integration projects
• Collaborative culture initiatives
• Automation of delivery & infrastructure
The APM world & AppDynamics fit in nicely
• Tool shared by Dev and Ops
• Clear path to continuous monitoring
• Possible integration with technical projects
• Quickly identified as a flag project of the initiative
• Objective : increase usage & visibility

9. THE EARLY DAYS OF APPDYNAMICS
Initiative driven by the Operations team
• Lacked visibility into application performance
• Unable to prove an application was performing poorly
Limited scope and configuration
• Used in Production & critical UAT environments
• Auto-discovery mode
• Single person responsible for maintenance
Usage
• Used by Ops team in a reactive manner
• Dev have access but lack the training
• Limited communications

10. BRIDGE & GENOA THROUGH APPDYNAMICS
Genoa
Multi tenant
High traffic
Semi-static
aspx pages
Single tenant
Low traffic
Highly
configurable

11. THE EARLY DAYS OF APPDYNAMICS
Navigating the data
• Configurability of Bridge & Genoa + auto-discovery = lots and lots of transactions!
• Overflowing catch all buckets
• Identifying and reporting bottlenecks is hard
The red lights
• Out of the box thresholds and health rules
• Yellow and red lights = confusion
Snapshot
• Clumsy business transaction breakdown = meaningless snapshots
• Hard sell for developers

12. THE EARLY DAYS OF APPDYNAMICS
Not used to its full potential
• Limited coverage
• Clumsy configuration
Teams rely on distinct tools to fill the gap
• Monitoring tools : Nagios, vCenter, HP Insight Manager, sys logs, etc
• Manual correlation
• Replication of environments on developer machines
• Profiling tools : .Net profiler, Fiddler, etc
Limited collaboration between Dev and Ops
• No common grounds
• No shared language

13. TURNING THE TIDE
13

14. ALL HANDS ON DECK

15. BVA & HEALTH CHECK
Best Value Assessment (BVA) & Executive Briefing
• Joint initiative from Oceanwide & AppDynamics (May 2016)
• 15-20 participants interviewed
• Established a clear picture of current practices at OW
• Identified critical objectives to achieve with AppDynamics
• Result : logical roadmap to reach those objectives including
• Health check
• Training & enablement
Health check
• Performed in September 2016
• On premise visit of a .Net solution architect from AppDynamics
• Hands on examination and recommendation on Oceanwide’s solution

16. ESTABLISHING THE LANGUAGE
Meaningful business transactions
• First critical step established by the
health check
• High value item, ROI was immediate
Optimal business transaction breakdown
• Designed by Dev & Ops
• Create the appropriate naming rules and apply the
configuration across all environments
• Transactions can now be used effectively and yield valuable
data
Common language
• Transactions that speak to all teams
• QA : transactions pertaining to their workflow
• Dev : valid data references for effective troubleshooting
• Ops : monitoring & reporting on critical business data

17. BUILDING ON SOLID GROUNDS
Redesign of browser EUM
• Out of the box configuration had even more impact
• Simple targeted rules greatly increased the value of this module
• Provided numerous end to end snapshots
Log analytics POV
• New module being tested by Oceanwide
• Will unify the perspective on logging capacities
• More teams can get involved with AppDynamics solution
• Will facilitate correlation of performance results and details of
execution across systems

18. GAINING MOMENTUM
Knowledge is key
• Increased efficiency during troubleshooting sessions
• Improved usage of certain features
• Faster & better results = increasing usage
In recent days
• Initiative is supported by all SMTs
• Make AppDynamics our #1 tool for performance investigations
• Build on current momentum
Next steps
• Implementation of health check recommendations
• Grow user base (account teams and business analysts)

19. A SUCCESS STORY
- THE PERFORMANCE TEAM
19

20. WORKING DEVOPS CELL
Team gained momentum in 2015
• Composed of individuals from various fields of expertise (Dev, QA, Ops, SMT)
• Discusses performance issues on a recurrent basis
• Pro-actively runs benchmark & load tests to assess performance of client solutions
Uses various tools to accomplish its means
• Load runner for test execution
• Excel for performance reporting
• AppDynamics to correlate results with server monitoring
• Profilers to troubleshoot bottlenecks
Drive to integrate & automated tool set
• Increased demand provided the push for automation
• Removal of manual correlation provided the drive for tool integration

21. EARLY ADOPTERS
Infrastructure
Performance
Correlation
AppDynamics
Dashboards
Complete
Performance
Reports
The roadblock : configuration
• Identified potential areas of
improvement
• Team provided early drive for more
in-depth understanding

22. GRASS ROOT EFFECT
Through 2016 – Continuous push for further usage of AppDynamics
• Main team to drive and interact with the AppDynamics experts
• Set the scope and tone for the technical deep dives, aimed at filling the knowledge gap
• Continuous increased usage
Expansion of the team
• New members of the team were introduced to the tool
• Increased the visibility and reach of the AppDynamics solution

23. CONCLUSION
23

24. RECAP
A journey that is ongoing
• Key milestones have been reached
• Momentum is better than ever with all key players on board
• Recent successes announce a bright future
A few critical steps enabled us to break out of a stagnant state
• Critical and timely support from AppDynamics experts
• Inclusion of individuals of all fields of expertise in all discussions
• Proper business transaction breakdown, the common language
• Simple grass root effect
What made one team succeed early on
• Well balanced team with DevOps mindset
• Drive for automation & integration

25. 25

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27. Thank you!
vincent-lamonde-21150216
@vincentlamonde
vincentl@oceanwide.com