Ávoris, the travel division of the Barceló Group, is a leading tourism company in Spain. They offer services such as booking of flights, hotels, vacation packages, and group tours via their online portal. Ávoris owns a variety of brands and tour operators including Quelónea, Jolidey, Catai and Special tours. Ávoris operates 685 travel agencies across Spain, serves 2.2 million travelers a year, and has more than 3,000 employees.
The Challenge
Ávoris has spent the last three years developing their applications in a containerized microservices environment. If these applications run slowly or throw errors, Ávoris is unable to generate revenue.
“If our applications show a lag in performance and take a long time to respond, customers will go to another travel site to purchase their vacation package.” – Ariel Sellés, Director of Operations
Ávoris’ intranet application is used by travel agency staff to build vacation packages for their clients. Their B2B applications support 8,000 travel agency sales representatives in Spain and Portugal, and their corporate application support 12,000 users who are employees of Ávoris’ travel services suppliers.
Prior to Instana, Ávoris had been using legacy Application Performance Management (APM) solutions to monitor their intranet and applications. The performance and health of these applications are critical to their business, and prior solutions didn’t provide the results needed to be successful. Ultimately, these solutions were unable to provide the insights into the applications and microservices that Ávoris needed to deliver the best possible customer experience. And so their journey began to discover a new monitoring solution, and quickly set their sights on Instana.
Goodbye Traditional APM. Hello Instana.
Ávoris installed Instana in less than a single morning with only one employee. Upon installation, Instana’s automatic infrastructure and service discovery had identified all physical and virtual hosts, containers, and service orchestrators. After detection, Instana automatically added technology specific sensors to the running processes and started monitoring the application’s performance and health instantly. No restarts were required. Consequently, any environment change is automatically discovered, recorded, and correlated to performance and health metrics.
Additionally, all of the metrics and traces are in a single correlated solution for all teams to access and collaborate – Operations, IT, and Development. Sellés noted that,
“We have all the data in the same place. Instana can monitor a bunch of different technologies and calculate metrics from the monitored traffic, which allows IT to perform vertical analysis. Anyone on our operations team can see all layers involved in each end user transaction.”
This enables Ávoris to proactively optimize their applications and microservices to best support their customer needs.
After evaluating Instana, it was an easy decision. Ávoris recognized the solution was developed for the cloud and microservices, not born out of a legacy APM.
“Our previous monitoring solution was an evolution of traditional APM, whereas Instana was born to support cloud-native infrastructures and microservices. We can drill down to see more detailed container data. This is where we are going as a company and ONLY Instana aligns with our vision.”– Gabriel Ramis, IT Operations Manager
Solving Issues Before They Become Problems
Technically, Ávoris needed to monitor OAuth services; web services that determine availability, buy services for its providers and store sales data; their corporate applications; and seven end-user B2B frontend applications with their corresponding B2C applications. Ávoris has nearly 1500 services that support its business.
Ávoris has more than 30 support workers in different teams using instana in production. They are able to immediately detect issues ranging from degradations of service quality to complex infrastructure issues with Instana’s one-second data granularity, real-time stream processing. Instana records and analyzes changes by tracking configurations specific to each monitored technology, as well as monitoring if something goes online or offline. With the granularity and depth of data, Ávoris’ teams are able to get a holistic view into the health of their entire environment so they can avert problems before they impact customers, vastly improving the overall customer experience.
Holding External Service Providers Accountable – Improved SLA Response Times
With Instana, Ávoris has begun to benefit from having better visibility across internal and external service dependencies. After a vendor application upgrade, Instana detected an error message indicating that a service was receiving malformed requests. The Operations team was unable to find the origin of the problem using logs file but realized that Instana could identify both the application that was receiving the calls and also the service generating the malformed requests. Sellés noted that,
“We’re able to drill down to the data that caused the application problem and prevent it from occurring again by giving it to the software provider to solve.”
With Instana, Ávoris discovered that some ofits suppliers were not meeting their SLA response times. Sellés continued
“Now we can see what’s happening outside of our systems. Suppliers’ performance has implications on our own performance in responding to our own customers.”
In another case, Instana indicated that a vendor’s service had poor response times. This spurred a productive discussion since Ávoris had empirical data leading to a quicker resolution of the issue.
Accelerating the Software Development Lifecycle
With Instana AutoTrace, distributed tracing and service discovery technology, Ávoris benefits from a trace for every user request across all systems, automatically with no-effort.
“Instana’s prevention messages – an alert such as memory is reaching its limit, allow Ávoris to avoid service interruptions and DevOps to focus on configuration and code adjustments,”– Gabriel Ramis, IT Operations Manager
Ávoris’ teams perform analysis on traces and resource metrics to improve their code, creating controlled test cases in both production and in test environments. Developers stress the applications and review the reports prior to promoting to production. Ramis noted that, “When a stress test fails, the developers can see and review the problems and fix them and then redeploy immediately.”
Gaining Broader Adoption Using Application Perspectives
Since Ávoris has deployed Instana, their average number of unique weekly users has steadily grown to more than 30. More and more users are finding value for their specific responsibilities by leveraging the power of Instana’s unique personalization and collaboration capabilities known as Application Perspectives. These capabilities allow Ávoris’ personnel to create tailored views of their monitoring data quickly and easily, thus improving the efficiency of their troubleshooting experience. They receive a performance summary of their cloud-native applications which leverages real-time distributed tracing. Behind the scenes, Instana generates each Application Dashboard with the timing metrics, response codes, and metadata gathered from every individual transaction that flows through Ávoris’ environment. This enables each DevOps team member to get the exact visualizations and information they need to optimize the applications and services they’re responsible for.
Summary
With Instana fully implemented, Ávoris finds satisfaction knowing every individual request is monitored and traced automatically. There is no longer a need to add monitoring code or configure their monitoring solution for each deployment. Ávoris can now deploy as frequently as they want, knowing that any change will be automatically discovered, the appropriate sensors will be deployed, and every request will be traced, automatically. Ávoris’ DevOps team can focus on code fixes, updates, and production changes that need to be deployed quickly, not on updating monitoring code.
