Carhartt's Journey to Complete Observability

The path to true end-to-end visibility

Carhartt has effectively employed Cisco AppDynamics for application-performance monitoring for the past five years. According to Laszlo, Cisco AppDynamics also helped his team refine and better manage its SAP implementation. He says, "Now we can not only see things like, if a CPU is spiking one day, we can figure out what transaction or what process is actually pushing the CPU up or consuming memory. Cisco AppDynamics has helped us improve performance and availability of SAP, enabling more efficient business operations."

The company wanted that same level of visibility in its network. That's why the decision was made to implement Cisco ThousandEyes. "We needed the combination of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes for true end-to-end visibility," says Laszlo. "The only way to get full-stack observability is to see everything every step of the way. So, for example, we can run an agent on the point-of-sale system at a particular store and we can see the network path that everything is going through via Cisco ThousandEyes." 

Laszlo adds, "With Cisco AppDynamics, we can see what's going on in the application, on the databases running in the cloud and then can correlate all that information. That data provides context to fine tune things, prevent issues from happening, and even get predictive about trends in capacity consumption.

"For me, it's about getting the right information to the right people at the right time. That's what this solution allows us to do. You can only do that with end-to-end visibility and Cisco Full-Stack Observability is the way to get there."

Overcoming the Black Friday/Cyber Monday dilemmas

Carhartt's investment in Cisco Full-Stack Observability has already paid big dividends. "My experience with Cisco Full-Stack Observability so far is proving that the solution really helped us gain visibility into some of our critical business transactions," says Laszlo. "For example, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are some of the busiest and most important days of the year for us and any retailer. Using AppDynamics, we were able to see orders going through the system, the monetary value each sale had, each day's hourly sales, and other key data points like these." 

He adds, "Because we know what's going on in all aspects of our business, we've already seen reduced downtimes and have been able to head off trouble before it impacts our customers."

That's good news for Carhartt and for wholesale customers that place orders and want updates on their order status.

Laszlo says, "We can't tell them the status if we don't know it ourselves. So, we have dashboards that track order management from end to end, from the time a customer places an order all the way until the order is shipped. Cisco Full-Stack Observability allows us to track everything and head off any issues. It helps us understand the context of where the problems are, the impact on our customer, and what role the network may be playing. It helps us isolate issues a lot faster."

Laszlo says, "Cisco AppDynamics has always been extremely strong in the application stack layer and continues to be that. We see that as being critical in all aspects of our business. Adding the integration with Cisco ThousandEyes provides the full-stack observability we really needed."

Painting a full-stack observability picture to secure executive support

To Laszlo, the benefits of Cisco Full-Stack Observability are very clear. For some organisations, convincing leadership to spend more money on yet another "technology tool" for visibility can be challenging. Not so, according to Laszlo, if you're able to illustrate the visibility gaps throughout your infrastructure. And that's something he did to perfection.

Prior to implementing Cisco Full-Stack Observability, root-cause analysis for application issues involved setting up war rooms with different IT folks across multiple domains. Laszlo was able to demonstrate how this lack of holistic visibility was affecting their mean time to resolution. "I simply drew a picture," says Laszlo. "I was able to show management the visibility gaps between our network, devices, the cloud, and the various systems that all come into play to support the store. I drew it out stop by stop and then put a red X everywhere we didn't have visibility at that time. The minute I showed that picture, the light bulbs went on for our leadership. They understood it and then fully supported the investment into Cisco Full-Stack Observability."

Carhartt's commitment to sustainability

For years now, Carhartt has placed a high priority on sustainability and the environment. So, it looked closely at how it could do its part, and Cisco Full-Stack Observability is playing a role.

"We have really tried to minimise the amount of paper and plastic we're using to label our products," says Laszlo. "The other thing we're doing is looking at things differently from a resource consumption point of view. We've recently undergone a major effort to better monitor variables like, how much water we can reuse and how much electricity we're using during peak times. It's not a surprise that our increased visibility is not only helping us to be good stewards of our resources but saving money as well."

What's next for Carhartt's full-stack observability journey?

As Carhartt continues to rely on Cisco Full-Stack Observability for end-to-end visibility, it's also looking into Cisco Secure Application, which protects applications at runtime, detects and blocks attacks in real-time, and simplifies the lifecycle security incidents by providing application and business context and creating a shared context across application and security teams.

For now, though, the insights gained from Cisco Full-Stack Observability will provide meaningful data that will help the company better understand and identify what's working and what's not and adjust accordingly.

"We're measuring impact," says Laszlo. "The number one way to do that is to see if we are reducing the time it takes to resolve issues. If there is an issue, we want to know if we had the visibility necessary to catch it ahead of time or if we didn't catch it, why not. Looking at the number of tickets we have, the number of outages, and the duration of those outages tell us a lot."

According to Laszlo, "We're just getting started and building our foundation. Right now, it's about gathering information and requirements, asking the business what's important, and what it wants most from our applications. We're really trying to become an enablement centre. We're using Cisco Full-Stack Observability to be more proactive and to prevent things from happening altogether. That allows our team to focus on our business, not on chasing down issues all day."