Port of Tallinn: Delivering Great Alerts To The Port Of Good News

Port of Tallinn

Port of Tallinn is the most innovative sea gate on the shores of the Baltic Sea. It has grown from a traditional infrastructure operator to a modern and multifaceted development and services company. The company is listed on the Nasdaq Tallinn Stock Exchange.

Background

To support their ferry business, Port of Tallinn have a custom developed IT solution that operates and manages all customer facing and internal business processes. Everyday development of the IT system is handled by an external vendor, while operating system and hardware level maintenance are carried out by in-house staff. All incident detection and escalation is managed by an in-house helpdesk team who respond to customer issues as they are raised.

Challenges

While the IT team had set up infrastructure monitoring with XXX and application performance monitoring with Dynatrace, they had learned that the resulting alerts were not actionable.

As a service company, Port of Tallinn uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) to track the quality of the service they provide to their customers. The IT team saw that lack of transparency would eventually negatively impact the high level of NPS that the company had achieved.

On the one hand, we had full overview of technical metrics describing our infrastructure. On the other hand, alerts that were reported as “critical”, stayed on our dashboards for weeks as they did not have end user impact. At the same time, we missed the actual critical incidents and had to rely on end user complaints. Hanno Hussar CIO, Port of Tallinn

In August 2019, Hanno’s team struggled to mitigate a large-scale production issue. It was clear that ticket selling application was performing less than optimally for many end users. However, implementing the fixes suggested by existing dashboards did not lead to any measurable improvement in end user experience.

Steering In The Right Direction

Plumbr software was installed to supplement the existing monitoring solutions. Within a couple hours after it was deployed on all application servers, Plumbr automatically detected performance bottlenecks and started displaying information about the impact of each of them in real time. The development team was able to stabilize the production environment within a couple days. In the following few weeks, other less critical bottlenecks were addressed.

Once stable operations were restored, Port of Tallinn used Plumbr’s end-user-experience based benchmarking tool to set up automated alerts for when end user experience deteriorates. They also built in automatic escalation rules to adequately raise alerts for IT operations team and to inform the Helpdesk team.

Benefits

End-to-end visibility of all transactions from end-user browser to data stores.
Automatic root cause detection via distributed tracing throughout application server infrastructure
End-user impact based alerts to IT operations and Helpdesk teams
Faster time to resolution