C u s to m e r C a s e St u d y : Z A P P O S . C O M
Zappos.com “Delivers WOW Through Service”
With Compuware APM
C u s to m e r
Business Challenge
Industry
E-Commerce
C h a lle n g e
Zappos.com needed to better manage
performance in order to achieve its
number one core value, to “deliver
WOW through service.” The site
was seeking better visibility into its
complex open-source, frameworkbased environment. It also needed
clearer visibility at the code level,
as well as into web service and
database calls.
Sol u tio n
Compuware dynaTrace
Re s u lt s
•
•
The Zappos Performance Lab can
proactively manage performance
and build it into all applications
from the start
Built a more collaborative
relationship with development
based on a common language,
speeding issue resolution
•
Helped improve call performance
12-fold
•
Improved front-end performance
10-fold
Established in 1999, Zappos.com has quickly become a leader in online apparel and
footwear sales by striving to provide shoppers with the best possible service and selection.
In 2008, the company’s gross merchandise sales exceeded $1 billion. Zappos.com
currently stocks millions of products from 1,000-plus clothing and shoe brands.
Zappos.com has built its reputation as an e-commerce leader by living and breathing
customer service. Indeed, the number one core value of Zappos is “deliver WOW
through service” and the Zappos IT organization is tasked to meet that core value by
delivering superior performance with its online experience.
Zappos has become “the web’s most popular shoe store,” selling over $1 billion in
shoes and apparel each year. On a daily basis, the site serves millions of visitors and
processes more than 65,000 purchases. To scale with its explosive growth, Zappos
re-architected its core site, shifting from a Perl-based architecture to one built
on Enterprise Java. In doing so, the company reviewed all the leading application
performance management (APM) vendors to find a solution that could provide deep
visibility into the performance of the new, modern architecture. “Overall, what’s
absolutely critical to the business,” said Kevin Charlton, QA manager for Zappos’
Technology team, “is that the performance experience we deliver when customers hit
our site is absolutely fantastic.
“We’re a company that’s powered by ‘second-to-none’ customer service,” Charlton added.
“So what’s absolutely critical to us is the speed of our site and the overall experience
that customers get when they come to our site, and — obviously — site availability.”
Prior to this architectural shift, however, Zappos hadn’t systematically managed
application performance. Charlton and performance guru Ryan Quinn, however,
looked to change that by creating the Zappos Performance Lab as the place where
performance would be built into all applications from the start and proactively
managed on a continuous basis.
Solution
“Our number one core value is we ‘deliver WOW through service’ and [Compuware]
– amongst all the other vendors — really ‘wowed’ us with its product and what it can
do,” said Quinn.
Zappos chose to outfit its newly established Performance Lab and developers with
Compuware dynaTrace, part of the Compuware APM platform, so the Lab could deliver
actionable data directly to developers, enabling them to quickly address any problems
they discovered and make performance enhancements.
“The Zappos Performance Lab is a combination of an injection-traffic
tier based on JMeter, and SOASTA that we use to simulate the users,”
Quinn describes. “dynaTrace is our analytics tier that gives us an
end-to-end solution as far as analytics is concerned.”
“With dynaTrace, we’re finding issues we’d previously been
completely blind to, so there would be a very good chance
that those issues would make it into production and then it
becomes very expensive for the technology group to fix things.”
——Kevin Charlton, QA Manager, Zappos
Results
From early on – just hours into the proof-of-concept — dynaTrace
provided the Zappos Performance Lab with deep application visibility
they could feed back to the development team for instant results.
“During the initial run with dynaTrace, they actually found an
inefficiency in our code — in an unlikely place,” said Lead Developer
Bill Weiss. “We found that our caching solution was actually taking
up a lot of time. In fact, we found when we did tests we could actually
retrieve data faster going straight to the disk than supposedly pulling
it out of memory. We replaced that caching solution with another
one, and we trimmed the time down from six milliseconds to half a
millisecond per request. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but that’s a
12-fold increase across all requests that we handle — that’s huge.”
“It would normally have taken them weeks to find these types of
fixes, and — before dynaTrace — it did,” said Quinn. “We’d know
that certain areas in the Java technology stack were underperforming.
So we’d try tweaks, we’d try code changes, we’d try to do things
differently, and sometimes it would improve things and sometimes it
wouldn’t. Sometimes many small improvements might add up to a big
improvement. With dynaTrace it was direct. With one ticket, we could
get a 12-fold improvement in speed in one area, with very little effort
on our part to find the root cause of the problem.”
Another area of fast results was in Zappos’ use of dynaTrace AJAX
Edition to get visibility into the browser code correlated back to
server-side code to quickly optimize front-end performance and
achieve an almost 10-fold improvement in speed. “We’ve been able
to see from the load time how much of the impact is JavaScript, what
actual functions are causing the slowdown, to the DOM interactions
to see how that’s impacting performance,” said Ray Morgan, lead
front-end developer. One area that Morgan found particularly slow was
the rendering of home page drop-down menus. “Using dynaTrace,
we were able to find out that it was primarily the determining of the
position of the drop-downs that was causing the slowdown,” Morgan
said. “Thanks to the insight provided by dynaTrace, we saw almost a
10-fold increase, just by doing that one little thing alone.”
In the end, everything important to Zappos.com arises from a
single-minded commitment to customer service. “What’s really key to
a customer is page load times, the responsiveness of our web site,”
said Charlton. “We have millions of product pages and images, so
there’s nothing more frustrating than having pages which are slow to
load, or the images don’t appear, and the customer’s having to wait
several seconds. So anything that improves customer experience on
our site — pages to appear instantly, searches returned quickly — is
crucial, and we think dynaTrace helps us with that considerably.”
By providing granular visibility on a transaction-by-transaction basis,
dynaTrace continuously provides Zappos with high-level data that they
can drill down into and thus quickly resolve issues. “dynaTrace shows
it to you all at a very high level so you’re not overwhelmed by the
amount of information you’re getting, but then it lets you drill down,”
said Quinn. “You drill down in dynaTrace, as low as you want to go, to
find out what is actually going on in those PurePaths.
“Working with development and QA, building this collaborative
relationship with each other, we were able to do more with much less
effort — in fact that’s core value number eight at Zappos, ‘do more
with less,’” continued Quinn. “We don’t want these long processes
to go forth in development, added to long processes that go into
QA, when there really should have been one process between the
two groups to do the same thing. So that’s another thing dynaTrace
allows us to do — we kind of bind our tasks into a common language
between QA and development.”
“With dynaTrace, we’re finding issues we’d previously been completely
blind to, so there would be a very good chance that those issues
would make it into production and then it becomes very expensive
for the technology group to fix things,” concludes Charlton. “Based
on the evidence so far, it’s virtually limitless where we can go with
dynaTrace.”
To learn more about Compuware APM, please visit:
compuware.com/apm
Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, provides software, experts and best practices
to ensure technology works well and delivers value. Compuware solutions make the world’s most important
technologies perform at their best for leading organizations worldwide, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500
companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites. Learn more at: compuware.com.
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© 2012 Compuware Corporation
Compuware products and services listed within are trademarks or registered trademarks of Compuware
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