Goal: Double the number of travelers
NS International experienced some reputation issues after onboarding a new high speed train that, ultimately, never went into long-term operation. The lack of additional transportation services negatively impacted travelers' experience. NS International set an ambitious goal: to double the number of international travelers by 2030. To achieve this, the company had to change its mindset and focus on improving the customer journey (literally).
Making use of data to optimize customer experience
To optimize the customer journey, data analysis and data science became crucial for measuring the indicators and outcomes of experiments on regular business. NS set up multiple business-oriented growth teams in a T-shaped profile, supported by seven different DevOps teams. Their hybrid on-premise and cloud IT landscape was monitored by several monitoring solutions - Logz.io, Elastic, Nagios, AWS Cloud Watch and Google Analytics.
The challenges: Need for IT insights, rapid experimentation and faster time to market
NS International was rapidly experimenting and scaling new solutions to deliver the best customer experience. The real problem was shortening the time to market of new initiatives within a very complex IT landscape. Platform operations needed to be super-efficient so the majority of IT resources could instead focus on development inside the DevOps teams. To support the rapid experimentation of new initiatives, the DevOps and business-oriented growth teams needed to perfectly align.
The following challenges had to be addressed:
Create a shared understanding of the entire IT stack across teams and tools
Implement a rapid feedback loop from the business team to the DevOps team
Gain more control over critical business processes
Decrease mean time to discover (MTTD) and mean time to remediate (MTTR) when incidents occur
Proactively predict the business impact caused by IT operations
Bringing all data together into one observability platform
In order to address these challenges, it was imperative for NS International to break down the silos between data generated and stored within their current environment. That's where StackState came in: all of the monitoring data from their existing systems came together within StackState's observability platform, creating a single source of truth for all teams. With this data, StackState generated full-stack visibility and shared understanding across teams and tools.
StackState acts as a lens where our data is focused on a single cross-domain perspective and analysis. This ensures higher productivity and rapid experimenting across our Business and DevOps teams, while maintaining stability and business performance.
Results: Using observability insights to improve productivity and efficiency
StackState delivered cross-domain actionable insights to the DevOps and growth teams, improving team efficiency and productivity. NS International accelerated its root cause analysis with StackState, which resulted in a significantly lower Mean Time to Discover and Mean Time to Remediate. StackState's own tracing agent enabled end-to-end insight and performance analysis, generating the broadest context possible to make faster (business) decisions.
Google Analytics is integrated into StackState as a top-level business metric. This ensures that the DevOps teams understand the impact they have on important business metrics, for example, the impact on tickets sold per hour.
Implementation of observability within the NS International IT teams enabled rapid experimenting of new initiatives while maintaining stability and business performance throughout the organization, with fast feedback loops across teams. As a result, they have minimized downtime and increased revenue.
