eG Enterprise is very easy to use and implement. The experience for both administrators and customers is great and quite easy to understand how to work with the system and make the best of it.
Key Benefits to Shufersal
- End-to-end visibility into the performance of dynamic, cloud-enabled application infrastructure
- Easily differentiate application problems from cloud infrastructure issues
- Automatic detection of root cause enables fast resolution of performance problems
- Proactive alerts when the cloud infrastructure runs out of capacity allocated
- Monitoring, diagnosis and reporting on all aspects with little manual intervention
Why eG Enterprise?
- One console to cover application, system, cloud, and infrastructure performance
- Monitoring of real users and ability to dive into code level views of application performance
- Default layer models of each tier make it easy to configure
- Personalized views and dashboards targeted at different users of the system
- Automatic baselining for proactive problem diagnosis
LOCATION : Israel
INDUSTRY : Retail
Shufersal is Israel’s largest supermarket chain, having more than 300 stores nationwide and revenues of over 3 billion US$. The company has over 62 years of experience in the retail industry and has over 13,000 employees. Shufersal’s branding is highlighted by its leading loyalty club which has over 1.4 million members. Like many businesses today, Shufersal recognized the need to go digital with its business by providing seamless shopping solutions and it has been creating an efficient and productive digital infrastructure for customers to transact online.
The Challenge: End-to-End Monitoring in a Dynamic Cloud Environment
Some of Shufersal’s key applications are web-based. Microsoft technologies are predominantly used – IIS web server for the front-end and SQL server for the backend. Technologies like Tomcat/Java, SAP Hybris and Solr are also used. The application tiers are deployed on a dynamic AWS cloud infrastructure. F5 is used for load balancing and many of the applications communicate with external web services. Application availability and performance are important for Shufersal to ensure that customers have a good experience with their applications.
Shufersal had three main requirements. "We need visibility into the true user experience, so we could see what customers were seeing. We also needed to be able to drill down and see the cause of application problems - which line of code, whether it was external web service calls, etc." said Lior Weinstein, System Team Leader at Shufersal. They were also looking for a single monitoring console to provide insights into usage and performance of the AWS infrastructure supporting the application. They also needed to be able to monitor the systems and application servers as well.
Monitoring how well auto-scaling in AWS worked was also important. The quality of service customers got was dependent on how auto-scaling handled resources of VMs. Metrics such as transactions need to be mapped to system level metrics such as, network and CPU usage and disk I/O rates.
Lior Weinstein, has over ten years of experience with monitoring tools, integrations and deployments. He and his team reviewed a number of monitoring solutions including freeware, system monitoring tools, application monitoring solutions and a few local solutions. eG Enterprise was considered because it provided insights into both the application stack and the supporting infrastructure in one console.
Lior Weinstein System Team Leader, Shufersal | Download Case Study »The Solution: Converged Application and Infrastructure Monitoring with eG Enterprise
eG Enterprise was deployed in a proof of concept for weeks. “We found it to be an excellent monitoring solution. Most importantly, implementation was easy and it gave benefits quickly. We did not have to work extra time to fine tune and decide which metrics to monitor. The solution supported a huge variety of applications and most of the management packs are ready to use”, said Lior Weinstein.
He also adds that “at first, it was a challenge to monitor the dynamic AWS infrastructure we used but eventually we succeeded in making everything work automatically. Real user monitoring, transaction tracing, system monitoring were all implemented without needing manual work from our end, which is what we wanted”.
Tightly integrated with AWS CloudWatch, eG Enterprise allows Shufersal’s IT team to track the digital experience of applications hosted in the cloud, analyze application workloads and correlate them with the performance of the IT infrastructure – all from a single pane of glass. This enables the IT team to easily differentiate between a problem in the application code vs. a problem in the supporting infrastructure.
“Just the other day, we noticed that eG Enterprise’s transaction monitoring reported that on one of our web servers, there were very few transactions compared to the other servers. On investigation, we found a configuration issue on our F5 load balancers. Without eG Enterprise, we would not have detected such issues proactively. This is just one of several situations where eG Enterprise has saved us time, effort and money”, said Lior Weinstein.
