Vodafone Increases Observability Across the Cloud

A market leader with many moving pieces

With millions of mobile customers, Vodafone Italy knows all about connecting people. It also knows how to manage a large network of technologies and services, so their customers get the best experience possible. 

That commitment to understanding customers and their needs also extends across Vodafone's IT infrastructure, from its databases, to its servers, to its business applications. Gaining visibility across the technology stack has become a top priority for the business as it manages a complex mix of applications and infrastructure in a hybrid-cloud environment, while modernising its entire customer experience.

Even minor network glitches can have ramifications for Vodafone's customers down the line. The ability to identify and resolve these issues before they snowball into major problems is paramount. This is especially true during peak periods such as a new iPhone launch, when traffic on Vodafone's website skyrockets, or ahead of internal deadlines like quarterly financial close, when the company's billing system must perform at a high level without failing.

"We run a large organisation with many moving pieces, each of which has its own peaks and particularities," says Roberto Meo, head of IT operations. "We need a centralised view of that ecosystem to deliver the highest standards of performance, reliability, and scalability for our customers, which is why we began looking for a tool to monitor that environment."

Modernising a multi-cloud environment

The telecommunications leader is now on a mission to improve its service quality, reduce downtime, and strengthen its application performance as part of a company-wide cloud migration. Indeed, the company has adopted a cloud-first focus across the board.

But with a complex multi-cloud environment to manage, which includes solutions from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Vodafone’s challenge is to maintain visibility and control over all these moving pieces.

In parallel, Vodafone continues to adopt a more data-driven approach to its customer experience, especially through its retail and web channels. The company is gradually migrating its consumer-facing services to a new digital marketplace and drawing on customers' behavioural data to make their purchasing journeys feel more tailored and personalised.

"Every business person you meet says that customer experience is everything, but CX can also mean nothing if you treat it superficially," says Enrico Croce, IT operations specialist. "To truly understand what customers are feeling, you need to look beyond their experience and focus on what the data tells you. That's why we've taken a data-driven approach to our entire IT ecosystem, from the way we manage our databases to the way we monitor and refine our customer-facing applications."

Drilling down into millions of IT transactions

Since initiating the Cisco AppDynamics solution in 2018, Vodafone centralised application monitoring for more than 30 business applications. It also added numerous databases and hundreds of servers across its IT network. The observability delivered by the Cisco AppDynamics solution allows the business to identify performance issues in near real-time, which means teams can identify the root cause of these challenges and address them quickly at the source.

"Not only does [Cisco] AppDynamics help us to manage performance issues more quickly and proactively, it gives us the end-to-end visibility we need to prioritise our performance needs," says Croce. Vodafone has used the Cisco AppDynamics solution to analyse billions of business transactions and millions of browser sessions since going live with the solution. This has helped the company identify and resolve issues with any problematic transactions.

The hours Vodafone saved in its application monitoring translated to major improvements to its customer experience. In addition, the insights it gained with the Cisco AppDynamics solution give the business firmer ground to stand on with its IT vendors. If a performance issue appears in one of its third-party software solutions, Vodafone can easily pinpoint its cause and work with the vendor to address it.