Fragmented monitoring challenges ability to deliver superior customer experience

Porsche Informatik develops and operates applications that power online storefronts for a diverse portfolio of iconic brands including Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley, and more. The software built and run by Porsche Informatik powers all customer-facing processes, such as appointment scheduling, sales management, financing, parts inventory, and ecommerce.

“Our applications are the frontline of the customer experience for the VW brands,” says Manfred Immitzer, chief executive officer for Porsche Informatik. “Whether in dealerships, online, or wholesale, our software plays a major role in the quality of our service.”

After years of technology transformations, Porsche Informatik’s application production environment became more complex and difficult to monitor. The team struggled to maintain its standard of 99.5 percent uptime for its digital services that support a range of customer-facing experiences and revenue-generating activities, like purchasing a car from a physical dealership or accessing financing options online.

“At any moment, thousands of customers are depending on our software. Application availability is paramount to our success. Our software has to be dependable because every second matters,” explains Peter Friedwagner, head of Infrastructure and Cloud Services.

Unifying visibility across cloud and on-premises environments

To tackle the complexities of its application environment and deliver on its commitment to “always on” availability, Porsche Informatik consolidated its existing monitoring and logging tools with Datadog.  

Once deployed, Datadog provided the comprehensive, real-time observability—across clouds, on-premises systems, databases, and networks—required to quickly identify and fix application performance issues. Datadog also broke down operational silos between infrastructure, software development, and other teams. By offering a unified view of data, Datadog fostered a shared understanding across the organization. This eliminated significant manual efforts, helping teams work together more quickly and efficiently to identify issues in application performance.

For example, by correlating data from APM and RUM, teams found ways to accelerate customer-facing applications, like digital services that allow shoppers to visualize customized cars before purchasing. Engineers can also easily delve into their tech stack to perform root cause analysis, such as identifying inefficient database queries with Database Monitoring (and also address impacted downstream services). By resolving these issues, application performance and responsiveness have been improved, allowing the company to scale its operations smoothly. 

Dirk Muthig, CTO of Porsche Informatik and Head of IT Governance for Porsche Holding Salzburg, says Datadog proved remarkably easy to use. Today, more than 900+ employees use Datadog. This democratization of data without the need for specialized skills has created efficiencies and boosted application quality. “Datadog is very intuitive,” Muthig says. “The customizable dashboards work just how you would want. It quickly won over anyone who tested it out, even the most skeptical members of my team. It’s been a frictionless introduction,” he adds. “People are able to use Datadog right away and they always ask ‘Can we do more with it?’”

Unified monitoring drives automotive excellence

Porsche Informatik was able to significantly improve the resilience of its applications while reducing the mean time to recover (MTTR) from a system failure and achieve  99.5 percent availability for its online services. By reducing outages, the organization avoided revenue loss while protecting retail customer experiences. “Now all the data about our application performance is on one platform, and anyone on any team can see the same data,” Friedwagner says. The unified view provided by Datadog helped accelerate our troubleshooting by an order of magnitude.

Porsche Informatik was also able to replace 10 other monitoring and logging tools with Datadog, making the observability platform a core component of the organization’s enterprise architecture. As a result, Porsche Informatik is running more unified DevOps processes and boosting organizational agility.

“Datadog is helping the average team work more effectively,” Muthig says. “Because we have so much more real-time insights that any team member can access, it is much easier and faster for everyone to understand how we need to prioritize our efforts to gain the greatest quality improvements.”

Most importantly, Datadog is helping Porsche Informatik protect VW’s brand reputation while driving innovation as one of the world’s leading automotive software providers. “The ongoing transformation of the automotive industry means we always have to be ready for the next steps, including the move to electric vehicles,” Immitzer says. “Datadog has proven to be the kind of strategic partner we needed to ensure our future success in this ever-changing environment.”