IntraLinks Optimizes Critical Business Transactions with Continuous APM

Case Study – Lifecycle – IntraLinks

Company IntraLinks Industry SaaS: Secure Document Exchange & Collaboration Location Global Challenge Optimize Key Business Transactions Application Environment Java WebLogic / Oracle / LoadRunner Requirements An application performance management system that provides: → 24x7 Code-level visibility into a

complex Java-based environment for fast root-cause determination to avoid downtime

→ Deep visibility at low overhead → The ability to manage business

transactions either by transaction type or end-user

→ The ability to optimize continuously across the lifecycle to proactively manage performance

Solution dynaTrace Continuous APM across the Lifecycle enables IntraLinks to: → Further enhance customer

experience by continuously monitoring performance transaction-by-transaction

→ Optimize key business transactions by both transaction type and individual user

→ Further proactively manage performance and prevent transient issues from impacting customer experience

→ Increase IT productivity by accelerating problem resolution

“A lot of other solutions will collect a lot of data and then aggregate it over an interval of five or even 15 minutes, and that just wasn’t what we needed. dynaTrace provides deep visibility into every single request.”

IntraLinks is a leading global provider of Software-as-a-Service solutions for securely managing content, exchanging critical business information and collaborating within and among organizations. More than one million professionals in industries

including financial services, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, consumer, energy, industrial, legal, insurance, real estate and technology, as well as government agencies, have utilized IntraLinks' easy-to-use, cloud-based solutions. IntraLinks counts 800 of the Fortune 1000 as users. www.intralinks.com Challenge: IntraLinks is a leading provider of critical exchange information solutions. IntraLinks’ platform is used by companies in industries such as financial services, life sciences and legal, which are typically involved in complex business opportunities that involve a large volume of documents, most of which are highly confidential. Not only must IntraLinks ensure that its cloud-based platform is secure, but it also needs to provide instant access to users as soon as documents are uploaded, which is vital during multi-million dollar business transactions. IntraLinks has supported more than one million professionals who have used the platform to execute business transactions. Its platform runs on a Java / WebLogic-based environment that needs to scale to peaks during daily usage. “We were looking for a new performance monitoring solution for the Java tier,” said Charlie Weiblen, director of performance engineering at IntraLinks. “We wanted to improve on our previous solution, because we wanted to have better insight into the performance of our platform. We looked at a lot of products and open source tools, and finally chose dynaTrace. It was the only solution that could give us the visibility we needed to understand how our customers’ business transactions were moving through our platform.” Solution: “The first thing that appealed to us about dynaTrace was just the ease of setup,” said Weiblen. “We had our platform up and running and instrumented with dynaTrace within an hour – very simple setup and configuration. The second thing is that it provides us visibility into every single request that comes into the system. A lot of other solutions will collect a lot of data and then aggregate it over an interval of five or even 15 minutes, and that just wasn’t what we needed. dynaTrace provides deep visibility into every single request.” Watch the IntraLinks Video Case

Low Overhead: “We were very confident and comfortable deploying dynaTrace into production and didn’t encounter any problems,” said Weiblen. “dynaTrace offers us the competitive advantage of very low overhead, and, most importantly, provides an even more optimal experience to our customers. dynaTrace is easy to configure and identify what’s important, which meant that we were able to get visibility into our platform at a depth that had no impact on performance that we could observe.”

Transaction-Level Visibility into the Customer Experience: The deep visibility into production performance that dynaTrace delivers enabled Weiblen and his team to quickly see all the issues that either were impacting their customers’ experience – or threatening to impact it. “We saw those issues with dynaTrace and fixed them.”

“We were very confident and comfortable deploying dynaTrace into production and didn’t encounter any problems. dynaTrace offers us the competitive advantage of very low overhead, and, most importantly, provides an even more optimal experience to our customers.” 

Such visibility into customer experience is key for successful SaaS offerings. “One of our primary objectives is to always provide as good a customer experience as we possibly can,” said Weiblen. “Having dynaTrace has really helped to identify even the small issues that perhaps users may not even complain about, but impacts their experience.” dynaTrace’s deep visibility lets IntraLinks proactively manage performance to the point where it’s able to prevent transient issues from hurting users’ experience.

“dynaTrace allows us to easily identify and break down a search request – and see how much time is spent in our application and how much is spent in the third‐party software. That’s very useful for us to understand how our application is performing, but also how third‐party software is performing.” 

Managing Business Transactions: Of critical importance to IntraLinks is the ability to manage business transactions as efficiently as possible for all users. “We use dynaTrace business transaction management (BTM) in a couple of different ways. One is to classify requests as they come in; we deal with a significant number of large documents or files related to transactions ranging from M&As to clinical trials, so uploads and downloads are really important to us,” said Weiblen. “Additionally, we provide a lot of functionality around seach – different ways for our customers to find documents – so it’s a very important part of our solution. For these different areas, we specifically set up business transactions in dynaTrace in order to watch them very closely and optimize their performance.”

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The granular visibility of dynaTrace BTM not only enables IntraLinks to pinpoint problems in its application, but also in the outside technology that’s integrated into its platform. “We have less control over the operation of the search engine, simply because it is provided by a third party,” explained Weiblen. “If we have any performance problems with search, we need to be able to determine if it’s an issue with our application or in the third party software. dynaTrace allows us to easily identify and break down a search request – and see how much time is spent in our application and how much is spent in the third-party software. That’s very useful for us to understand how our application is performing, but also how third-party software is performing.”

“One of our primary objectives is to always provide as good a customer experience as we possibly can. Having dynaTrace has really helped to identify even the small issues that perhaps users may not even complain about, but does impact their experience.” 

“If or when we do have an issue or a performance problem, we can go to the dynaTrace PurePaths and find that request – and since we have the context configured in business transactions we can know it’s user X at customer Y, working in a particular IntraLinks exchange, trying to use this piece of  functionality in the application. It’s very useful for us not only to identify the issue, but also to identify what the user is doing and who that user is. Only with this information can we both understand the impact on our business as well as fix the underlying problems quickly.” 

A dynaTrace BTM Dashboard

Just as important, dynaTrace BTM enables deep granularity into the performance experience of IntraLinks users to better understand run-time system behavior. “The second way we’re using BTM is to provide context around requests,” Weiblen continued. “If or when we do have an issue or a performance problem, we can go to the dynaTrace PurePaths and find that request – and since we have the context configured in business transactions we can know it’s user X at customer Y, working in a particular IntraLinks exchange, trying to use this piece of functionality in the application. It’s very useful for us not only to identify the issue, but also to identify what the user is doing and who that user is. Only with this information can we both understand the impact on our business as well as fix the underlying problems quickly.” Lifecycle Approach Delivers Major Productivity Gains: dynaTrace’s lifecycle approach has significantly improved IntraLinks’ IT productivity. “Using dynaTrace has significantly reduced the time it takes to resolve a problem with development,” explained Weiblen, “All issues are now typically taken care of in less than 24 hours.”

With dynaTrace in production it’s even more of an improvement in terms of time‐to‐resolution for performance issues because we capture the details of every transaction and eliminate the need to reproduce problems and manually comb through log files.  With dynaTrace, we know so much more about what’s happening in our system.” 

Even more significant productivity improvements have come from having the dynaTrace system in production and deployed across the entire lifecycle. “With dynaTrace in production it’s even more of an improvement in terms of time-to-resolution for performance issues because we capture the details of every transaction and eliminate the need to reproduce problems and manually comb through log files. With dynaTrace, we know so much more about what’s happening in our system.”