APM Monitoring for KedronUK - A Partner Case Study

In April 2020, eG Enterprise enabled this company to experience zero downtime for the first time ever, helping employees be more productive.

The Client

The client is a family business renowned for selling outstanding tea and coffee. It has a rich heritage dating back to the early 20th century when the company's founder opened his first cafe . Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength and now offers some of the best-selling tea and coffee brands in the UK.

It also runs a number of branded cafes, tea rooms, and shops. The first of these opened in North-East England over 100 years ago. More recently, the business has diversified with a successful online mail ordering service. This offers a wide range of luxury products, including hampers, cakes, chocolates, tea, and coffee.

The company employs an average of 60 call center staff, rising to around 100 during busier periods. 50 percent of its online sales take place in the eight weeks leading up to Christmas, with additional peaks around Easter and Mother's Day. When the Coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, the subsequent lockdown resulted in an uplift in online sales equivalent to that of the busiest trading times.

The Challenge: Implementing a Compatible APM Solution

The company was experiencing issues with the ERP system for its mail order processing and despatch platform, which were thought to relate to the backend database. The site runs on Microsoft Dynamics AX with a SQL Server relational database management system and additional bespoke code. It handles all orders for the business, including those placed online as well as others entered manually by staff as a result of telephone orders.

The staff were experiencing several issues, which were exacerbated during busy trading periods. These included system delays when processing telephone orders as well as problems loading bulk orders. In addition, the printing of barcodes for packing labels would intermittently grind to a halt. With set courier pick-up times, this could result in delays to deliveries, causing potential issues if customers had booked a specific delivery slot.

Apart from affecting staff morale and productivity, these complications had a negative impact on overall customer experience. In many cases, customers were kept waiting on the telephone because of delays to the system, which proved to be extremely frustrating for both parties.

James Targett, Application Service Delivery Manager at the company, had previously tried increasing server resource database table sizes, and also invested in additional hardware resources. However, despite this, the issues continued. The business had previously been using Microsoft Dynamics monitoring tools and evaluating CPUs from a resource level. However, with Christmas 2020 fast approaching, it was decided that a more sophisticated method was required to gain a better understanding of application performance and help resolve any issues experienced. The business was keen to explore an APM solution compatible with Microsoft Dynamics AX and, following consultation with our tech partner, KedronUK, turned to eG Innovations.

Our customer had been investigating performance issues with their Microsoft Dynamics ERP. During peak-times, slow performance was impacting the ability of colleagues to process orders, frustrating both them and customers who had to wait. A range of fixes had been attempted, such as the assigning additional hardware resources to the Virtual Machines which ran the Dynamics platform but issues remained. Thus it was important to provide detailed insight into the performance of the components which make up a Dynamics installation - not just the core Dynamics processes but also Microsoft SQL Server. As the eG Enterprise Suite has out-of-the-box support for not only SQL Server but also Dynamics, it was a logical choice for our customer to evaluate as tool to provide the information they needed.

The KedronUK and eG team worked to assist our customer with the evaluation, utilising the eG SaaS platform which reduced the requirements and time to deploy eG Enterprise Suite.

This is another great example of how KedronUK's specialist team is able to fully review a customer's unique environment and select the right combination of technology and services to solve the problems.

Chris Booth Solution Architect at KedronUK  |  Download Case Study »

 

eG Enterprise Provides a Comprehensive End-to-End APM Solution

The eG Enterprise suite from eG Innovations provides a dedicated, out-of-the-box monitoring tool fully compatible with Microsoft Dynamics. Offering an end-to-end solution, it is designed to help improve business outcomes with IT monitoring and proactive performance management.

Metrics monitored include client sessions, requests, and processing rate. This gives Microsoft Dynamics administrators a clear picture to help understand the load and responsiveness of their platform. The eG Enterprise suite also monitors host server performance. It provides visibility of key data such as CPU load, disk I/O and memory consumption to help identify the impact of these various elements on the performance of Microsoft Dynamics.

The easy-to-use interface offers a single pane of glass, wherein administrators can build a bespoke and intuitive dashboard tailored to their monitoring requirements. This enables them to view the status and performance of server components critical to the operation of Microsoft Dynamics, easily isolating bottlenecks in any layer of the application and operating system.

Real-time alerts instantly identify any potential issues across multiple domains. This helps to reduce the time taken to pinpoint the root cause of application performance concerns for faster troubleshooting.