In the current dynamic and complex cloud environment, a single hour of downtime can result in staggering costs for businesses. With digitization, applications play a significant role in a company’s operations and even minor performance issues can have serious consequences. Therefore, it is crucial to implement effective performance monitoring measures to mitigate potential disruptions and ensure smooth business operations.

“One common reason for downtime is the absence of effective, real-time and full-stack performance monitoring for vital business applications, even as most enterprises have access to some observability tools,” says Siddhesh Naik, Country Leader, Data, AI & Automation software, Technology Sales, IBM India & South Asia. “This is because not many application performance monitoring (APM) products give you full spectrum and application landscape visibility. Most tools lack the level of automation required to tackle the complexity that today’s modern, distributed and complex environments demand,” he adds.

This is why FirstMeridian Business Services Ltd chose IBM Instana Observability to keep track of their expanding application landscape and monitor their performance.

FirstMeridian is an end-to-end HR solutions provider serving 1200+ clients across 3500+ locations. Their customers span industry sectors like telecom, retail, BFSI, IT/ITES, manufacturing, among others.

Since its founding in mid-2018, FirstMeridian has been pursuing a successful growth-by-acquisition strategy – causing their application landscape to grow and become more distributed. This resulted in the need for better visibility into their applications and infrastructure, a crucial element to ensure application performance, prevent downtime and accelerate mean time to resolve incidents which have direct impact on their operations with clients.

“The APM tool that we were using prior had its limitation, as it was not scalable to keep pace with our rapid expansion. Hence after careful consideration we chose to work with IBM and use the Instana Observability tool to monitor our application stack and gain real-time insights into our application environments,” said Satish Kukde, Head of IT Infrastructure, FirstMeridian.

IBM Instana is enabled with AI and machine learning to provide continuous discovery – so new deployments and any changes are automatically detected and configured. It provides full stack visibility discovering all components and continuously monitoring application performance in real-time with no sampling.

FirstMeridian saw great success with the impressive capabilities of IBM's Instana Observability upon its deployment. The solution effectively mapped out the interdependencies of applications, providing comprehensive visibility for application developers and IT teams. This allowed them to promptly address code-level issues and respond proactively to alerts provided by the tool.

Talking about the benefits Raghav Poojary, Deputy Chief Digital Officer, FirstMeridian said, “With Instana Observability, we gained high accuracy and complete end-to-end transaction tracing. Issue identification now takes only a few seconds since we have higher visibility into our IT landscape. In addition, its Smart Alerts efficiently filter out unnecessary event and log information, simplifying the identification of the exact location of any issue.”