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Indiana Office of Technology Improves Government Services for Millions of Hoosiers
Key Challenges
Indiana Office of Technology (IOT) had to overcome limited visibility into application performance to help state agencies strengthen their services and manage traffic surges, while ensuring the health of IOT’s IT operations.
Key Results
With Splunk AppDynamics, IOT proactively resolved application performance bottlenecks and improved the speed and reliability of government services that its agencies provide across the state.
Serving seven million citizens across 100 state agencies, IOT uses Splunk AppDynamics to improve the performance and reliability of 74 citizen-facing applications.
Nearly seven million people rely on the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT) to enable government services they use each day. From the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to the Commissioner of Higher Education, IOT is the technology engine for more than 100 state agencies, ensuring that Indiana’s citizens can access the services and information they need, when they need them.
However, not all Indiana state agencies are required to use IOT's services — in fact, they're free to choose any state-approved IT provider. This flexibility puts pressure on IOT to demonstrate the value it brings to government operations. As a result, IOT has a critical need to understand how its applications and infrastructure are performing at a granular level and must deliver continuous performance improvements across the board.
“The applications and infrastructure we manage support dozens of citizen services,” says Brad Welsh, Network Architect at IOT. “Our mandate is to make sure all that technology runs as smoothly as possible and that agencies have the support they need to best serve the people of Indiana.”
This mandate came to the forefront in 2020 when more people than ever were accessing Indiana’s online services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Disparate systems and a lack of visibility into application performance made it difficult for IOT to manage this surge while ensuring the health of its IT operations.
Outcomes
- Improved performance, visibility, and insight into 74 citizen-facing applications
- Achieved 99% reduction in peak-demand response time for unemployment-claims homepage
- Improved operational efficiency with a real-time view across network, apps, and services
Decoding the black box of application performance
At the direction of the State of Indiana CIO, IOT began using AppDynamics to remove the shroud of mystery surrounding its applications and infrastructure. It gained newfound visibility into and control over the state’s IT operations.
“Our applications used to be a black box, and to make matters more complicated, state agencies were stuck managing them on their own,” says Welsh. “Splunk AppDynamics helped us put that dynamic in the past. We’ve become a true partner with our agencies, giving them peace of mind that their critical services are performing at a high level.”
With a real-time view into how agency applications and infrastructure are working together, IOT can now see within seconds whether a slowdown is being caused by a server issue, a network performance glitch, or a problem at the application code layer.
What’s more, a clearer view of the root cause of issues helped IOT to eliminate the ambiguity over who is responsible for solving them. Teams know where the problem is and what needs to be done — which means they spend less time searching and more time resolving the issue together.
I create monthly metrics based on application score cards that tell the story of the health of our business-critical applications to the executive branch of our state government.
Bridging the gap
Application performance management (APM) had long been a priority for the team, who wanted to bridge the gap between IOT’s infrastructure services and the many agency applications it supports. Their AppDynamics implementation began with a proof of concept for two of Indiana’s most critical constituent-facing agencies: Indiana Professional Licenses Agency (PLA) and the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV).
In the case of PLA, AppDynamics revealed bottlenecks across the agency’s infrastructure and applications, including slowdowns with its SQL database, latency between the database and end users, and code-level issues with the PLA application itself. Armed with that information, IOT was able to eliminate the bottlenecks and improve PLA’s services overnight.
“That first POC was a turning point. We understood right away that AppDynamics could deliver tremendous value across our organization and began to expand our rollout to other agencies,” says Welsh.
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Informing state strategy with performance data
IOT now uses AppDynamics to support 74 state agencies and counting, making government services faster, more performant, and more reliable for the citizens of Indiana.
Another major test came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Indiana Department of Workforce Development (DWD) saw unemployment applications jump from 27,000 to 630,000 vouchers per week. It was a trying moment for the state, and slow web page load times and frequent server crashes made the DWD’s online services cumbersome and slow. Within days of deploying AppDynamics, IOT was able to pinpoint and resolve the DWD bottlenecks, cutting load times for its claimant homepage from 28 seconds to just 400 milliseconds.
DWD is not alone. State agencies across Indiana appreciate the value AppDynamics delivers, both in terms of performance and the insight it provides into how they can enhance their citizen-facing services.
“I create monthly metrics based on the application score cards from AppDynamics that tell the story of the health of our business-critical applications to the executive branch of our state government,” says Welsh.
Adding the secret sauce of professional services
Welsh was also wowed by the support that AppDynamics Professional Services provided throughout IOT’s implementation. “AppDynamics Professional Services helped us configure our services, showed us where to look for bottlenecks, and highlighted where we needed to improve our code,” he says.
This support also helped IOT add value in the form of direct access to AppDynamics experts. “The secret sauce is getting state agencies on the phone with Splunk AppDynamics experts, who are total wizards at walking them through their needs and finding workable solutions,” adds Welsh.
Next up for IOT is the migration of its on-prem IT Infrastructure to the Microsoft Azure cloud. As Welsh explains, the ability to monitor and optimize performance across the stack, from infrastructure to end-user applications, will be crucial to its cloud journey and to gain support from IOT’s agency network.
“AppDynamics helped us build stock with agencies like never before, and we’re going to need that engagement to bring our cloud vision to life,” says Welsh. “Looking at where we are today compared with just a few years ago, all signs point to us making that happen.”
AppDynamics helped us build stock with agencies like never before, and we’re going to need that engagement to bring our cloud vision to life.
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