Metcash has set up a core observability platform that takes the place of up to 20 monitoring tools, and which has helped the company manage a large-scale digital transformation program.
Metcash head of integration delivery Michael Jordan
The company – whose food, liquor and hardware retail brands include IGA, Cellarbrations and Total Tools – is using Dynatrace for its observability platform and worked with Deloitte on the project.
Metcash had some existing positive experience with Dynatrace, having used it in its e-commerce operations, which are powered by what used to be called SAP Hybris. Dynatrace comes embedded with Hybris (now called ‘Commerce Cloud’) subscriptions.
It only started to use Dynatrace outside of its e-commerce operations more recently, coinciding with a large-scale digital transformation, which it sought to de-risk.
Metcash’s multi-year ‘Project Horizon’ is re-platforming core legacy systems onto Microsoft Dynamics 365 and deploying a suite of cloud-native tools like Azure Synapse Analytics.
“We’re in the middle of a transformation, re-platforming some of our core platforms. We’ve just done our finance platform; we’re in the middle of doing our supply chain operations platform, [which] for a business like ours [is] our heart and soul; and we’re also migrating a lot of our peripheral workloads into Azure cloud,” Metcash head of integration delivery Michael Jordan said.
“It’s quite a complex activity.”
Jordan said that Metcash is taking a staged approach to transformation, and so it’s initial requirement for observability was to keep tabs on all systems – transformed and existing – to ensure they remained connected and operational.
“We found Dynatrace to be really helpful in that transitional period,” he said.
The decision to go down the Dynatrace path was made with integration partner Deloitte.
“They reviewed some of the challenges we were having [around observability] and all the different tools we had established; and we had many,” Jordan said.
“At the surface, it looked like five or so but, by the end, it was over 20; they were all filling our needs but in variations and not completely.”
After Deloitte recommended “a core integration platform,” Dynatrace was deployed over a three-month period, with dashboards set up to monitor different operations and to collect, combine and visualise metrics.
“Teams that were using multiple tools and jumping in and out of different views and crunching data and doing manual checklists now had a single view where all this information is presented to them,” Jordan said.
They now check the dashboard every morning, “drill in as necessary, and then they can kick off their remediation activity as required.”
Broader use cases
Metcash said that setting up Dynatrace dashboards and application performance monitoring (APM) became “phase one” of its Dynatrace deployment, but it became apparent that more capabilities of the software could be used.
“Phase one helped answer: “What is in our landscape? Is it operating effectively? Are there any errors?” Jordan said.
In “phase two,” Metcash is analysing more of the data collected and stored by Dynatrace, in its Grail data lakehouse, to “get an understanding of the ‘why’.”
“Why are things failing? We’re seeing this failure here; we’re seeing a performance issue here; why is that the case?” Jordan said.
The company is also making use of PurePath for transaction analysis.
PurePath is a distributed tracing and code-level analysis tool that stamps a unique ID on each interaction with an application; the ID travels with all requests that the interaction sends, making their effects across the entire technology stack viewable and traceable on the PurePath dashboard.
Automated troubleshooting
Jordan said Metcash is now starting to “entertain” workflow automation: “How do we perform some of those immediate activities that our operations teams are going to be doing anyway?”
He has used Dynatrace to automate the early stages of troubleshooting and integrated Dynatrace with the orchestration features of Red Hat Ansible.
Jordan said that Dynatrace’s automation use cases are “still very ‘workbench’ at the moment,” and there were “no strict timelines,” for building more, but the data Dynatrace had made available about Metcash’s environment and operations had made automating workflows much simpler.
Metcash has automated the information-gathering stage of troubleshooting issues; when the operations team are given a new problem to solve, they’re given all the relevant error data at the same time without having to hunt for it manually.
From IT to business observability
Jordan said that providing Metcash’s different business units with more advanced metrics through Dynatrace was another use case in its early stages of planning.
“We’ve got IT metrics; we love IT metrics; they’re coming through; we’re holding ourselves accountable to these metrics,” Jordan said.
“But it’s not uncommon for me now to have a leader of a business unit message me on Teams, and inquire about Dynatrace and how to potentially [use it to] solve a problem.
Jordan said this is “certainly an area we want to get into” but that it would likely take some time.
Jordan said that Dynatrace had already been customised to communicate how the different IT events it detected could affect relevant business functions, which was helping Metcash’s IT team notify the relevant divisions.
Jeremy Nadel attended Dynatrace’s Innovate Sydney conference as a guest of Dynatrace.