Carhartt Realizes Record Holiday Sales While Delivering a Cloud-First Strategy with Turbonomic
24x7
Performance assurance with software continuously making resource decisions.
15%
Improvement in resource utilization by automating VM placement with Turbonomic.
45%
Improvement in Azure cloud efficiency while assuring application performance.
About Carhartt
- Leading Apparel Maker
- 2,200+ US Employees
- Nearly $1 BN Revenue
- Aspiring to 100% Azure Cloud by 2022
- Uses Turbonomic with AppDynamics to leverage application metrics for smarter resourcing decisions in the infrastructure.
Rapid Growth Creates Challenges in Application Performance & Hybrid Cloud
Carhartt has been one of the hardest-working companies in America since its founding in Detroit in 1889. Originally designed for rail workers, Carhartt soon became the choice for workers in automobile production, construction and many other industries. More recently, Carhartt’s blue-collar roots and reputation for creating durable, reliable products has helped the brand expand to include younger consumers especially those involved in the resurgence of the skilled trades industry. This new market has caused Carhartt’s revenues to rocket from under $100MM in the 90’s to nearly $1BN today. The Carhartt IT team has managed this growth with a combination of old-fashioned hard work and smart deployment of tech. Even with all this recent innovation, such rapid growth created challenges for the Carhartt team in:
- Planning for spikes in demand and mitigating performance issues
- Responsibly leveraging public cloud resources
Turbonomic identified opportunities for improvement, including adjusting Java Heap sizes, powering off low-use systems, adjusting VM hardware for best performance, and consolidating VM’s for performance as well as efficiency.
Carhartt Achieves Record Holiday Sales with Application-Centric Analysis of their Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
The Black Friday period is particularly challenging for consumer brands, especially those seeing such rapid growth. As an early adopter of Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Carhartt had for years used AppDynamics to spot code issues and manage performance, but recently a spike in demand had created issues between their front-end site and multiple back-end systems including inventory and loyalty systems. Insight from AppDynamics demonstrated the code was fine, but it could not pinpoint the root cause of the performance issue.
Senior Systems Engineer, Gary Prindle, convinced IT leadership under new Infrastructure VP, Tim Masey, to install Turbonomic. Turbonomic was able to understand the resource relationships between their hardware, virtualization, and AppDynamics, stitching together Carhartt's complete application stack. The software then identified opportunities for improvement, including adjusting Java Heap sizes, powering off low-use systems, adjusting VM hardware for best performance, and consolidating VM’s for performance as well as efficiency. With Turbonomic's prescriptive actions Gary Prindle and his team were able to prevent performance issues from occurring during the holiday season (and beyond), driving record sales.
"Turbonomic's automated actions not only improve performance, but they free up the team's resources. The team now has more time to innovate rather than focusing on keeping the lights on."
Gary Prindle
Senior Systems Engineer
Carhartt
Turbonomic's Capabilities Continue to Drive Carhartt to Success
Carhartt has fully automated VM placement with Turbonomic, helping improve overall performance while reducing resource consumption by 15%. By integrating Turbonomic's resourcing actions into their ServiceNow workflows, they are also beginning to automate VM resizing as well.
“Turbonomic’s automated actions not only improve performance, but they free up the team’s resources,” said Prindle. “The team now has more time to innovate rather than focusing on keeping the lights on.”
Carhartt IT has also been tasked to go 100% public cloud by 2022. As a Microsoft shop, they are focused on how best to leverage Azure. Using Turbonomic to optimize their initial cloud deployments, Carhartt IT found that Turbonomic could optimize their Azure efficiency by 45%, while assuring workload performance.
“Our integration of Turbonomic and AppDynamics creates a closed-loop performance-feedback system that can automate away avoidable issues so we can focus on the unavoidable. We are excited about the ServiceNow-Turbonomic integration which, already in a very short amount of time, is already driving greater agility for Carhartt IT – and an even better experience for our customers.”
Tim Masey
VP of IT Infrastructure & Security
Carhartt
Helping Carhartt Responsibly Get to 100% Azure Cloud by 2022
Moving forward, as Carhartt’s cloud strategy matures, Turbonomic serves a key role in assuring application performance for all workloads and Carhartt is looking to leverage additional Turbonomic capabilities:
- Delivering more automation to prevent application performance risk proactively and reduce manual time required to support application resource management.
- Leveraging the Turbonomic-ServiceNow integration to accelerate agility in their closed-loop performance-feedback system in combination with their existing Turbonomic-AppDynamics integration
- Supporting application performance assurance on containerized workloads in Carhartt’s future IT strategy.
- Ensuring performance and policy adherence of public cloud workloads as Carhartt migrates safely to Azure by 2022.